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THE WAR THAT 
WILL END WAR 



THE WAR THAT 
WILL END WAR 



BY 

H. G. WELLS 

Author of "Tono-Bungay," "The New 
Machiavelli," "Marriage," etc. 




NEW YORK 

DUFFIELD & COMPANY 

1914 



1% 



Copyright 1914 
By H. G. wells 



NOV 17 1914 X 



CI.A887552 



CONTENTS 

I Why Britain went to War . . . 

II The Sword of Peace 

III Hands off the People's Food 

IV Concerning Mr. Maximilian Craft 

V The Most Necessary Measures in the 
World 



VI The Need of a New Map of Europe 

VII The Opportunity of Liberalism 

VIII The Liberal Fear of Russia . 

IX An Appeal to the American People 

X Common Sense and the Balkan States 89 

XI The War of the Mind 97 



page 
9 

16 

23 

32 

40 
50 
60 
69 
80 



THE WAR THAT 
WILL END WAR 



WHY BRITAIN WENT TO WAR 

A CLEAR EXPOSITION OF WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR 

The cause of a war and the object of a war are 
not necessarily the same. The cause of this war 
was the invasion of Luxemburg and Belgium. We 
declared war because we were bound by treaty to 
declare war. We have been pledged to protect the 
integrity of Belgium since the kingdom of Bel- 
gium has existed. If the Germans had not broken 
the guarantees they shared with us to respect the 
neutrality of these little States we should certainly 
not be at war at the present time. The fortified 
eastern frontier of France could have been held 
against any attack without any help from us. We 
had no obligations and no interests there. We 
were pledged to France simply to protect her from 
a naval attack by sea, but the Germans had already 
given us an undertaking not to make such an at- 
tack. It was our Belgian treaty and the sudden 
outrage on Luxemburg that precipitated us into this 
conflict. No Power in the world would have re- 

9 



10 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

spected our Flag or accepted our national word 
again if we had not fought. So much for the im- 
mediate cause of the war. 

But now we come to the object of this war. [We 
began to fight because our honour and our pledge 
obliged us; but so soon as we are embarked upon 
the fighting we have to ask ourselves what is the 
end at which our fighting aims. We cannot simply 
put the Germans back over the Belgian border and 
tell them not to do it again. We find ourselves at 
war with that huge military empire with which we 
have been doing our best to keep the peace since 
first it rose upon the ruins of French Imperialism in 
1 87 1. And war is mortal conflict. We have now 
either to destroy or be destroyed. We have not 
sought this reckoning, we have done our utmost to 
avoid it; but now that it has been forced upon us 
it is imperative that it should be a thorough reckon- 
ing. This is a war that touches every man and 
every home in each of the combatant countries. It 
is a war, as Mr. Sidney Low has said, not of soldiers 
but of whole peoples. And it is a war that must 
be fought to such a finish that every man in each 
of the nations engaged understands what has hap- 
pened. There can be no diplomatic settlement that 
will leave German Imperialism free to explain away 
its failure to its people and start new preparations. 
We have to go on until we are absolutely done for, 
or until the Germans as a people know that they are 



WHY BRITAIN WENT TO WAR ii 

beaten, and are convinced that they have had enough 
of war. 

We are fighting Germany. But we are fighting 
without any hatred of the German people. We do 
not intend to destroy either their freedom or their 
unity. But we have to destroy an evil system of 
government and the mental and material corrup- 
tion that has got hold of the German imagination 
and taken possession of German life. We have to 
smash the Prussian Imperialism as thoroughly as 
Germany in 1871 smashed the rotten Imperialism 
of Napoleon III. And also we have to learn from 
the failure of that victory to avoid a vindictive tri- 
umph. 

This Prussian Imperialism has been for forty 
years an intolerable nuisance in the earth. Ever 
since the crushing of the French in 1871 the evil 
thing has grown and cast its spreading shadow over 
Europe. Germany has preached a propaganda of 
ruthless force and political materialism to the whole 
uneasy world. " Blood and iron," she boasted, was 
the cement of her unity, and almost as openly the 
little, mean, aggressive statesmen and professors 
who have guided her destinies to this present con- 
flict have professed cynicism and an utter disregard 
of any ends but nationally selfish ends, as though it 
were religion. Evil just as much as good may be 
made into a Cant. Physical and moral brutality 
has indeed become a cant in the German mind, and 



12 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

spread from Germany throughout the world. I 
could wish it were possible to say that English 
and American thought had altogether escaped its 
corruption. But now at last we shake ourselves 
free and turn upon this boasting wickedness to rid 
the world of it. The whole world is tired of it. 
And " Gott ! " — Gott so perpetually invoked — 
Gott indeed must be very tired of it. 

This is already the vastest war in history. It 
is war not of nations, but of mankind. It is a 
war to exorcise a world-madness and end an age. 

And note how this Cant of public rottenness has 
had its secret side. The man who preaches cyni- 
cism in his own business transactions had better keep 
a detective and a cash register for his clerks ; and it 
is the most natural thing in the world to find that 
this system, which is outwardly vile, is also inwardly 
rotten. Beside the Kaiser stands the firm of 
Krupp, a second head to the State ; on the very steps 
of the throne is the armament trust, that organised 
scoundrelism which has, in its relentless propaganda 
for profit, mined all the security of civilisation, 
brought up and dominated a Press, ruled a national 
literature, and corrupted univeti'J^^. 

Consider what the Germans have been, and what 
the Germans can be. Here is a race which has 
for its chief fault docility and a belief in teachers 
and rulers. For the rest, as all who know it inti- 
mately will testify, it is the most amiable of peoples. 



WHY BRITAIN WENT TO WAR 13 

It is naturally kindly, comfort-loving, child-loving, 
musical, artistic, intelligent. In countless respects 
German homes and towns and countrysides are the 
most civilised in the world. But these people did 
a little lose their heads after the victories of the 
sixties and seventies, and there began a propaganda 
of national vanity and national ambition. It was 
organised by a stupidly forceful statesman, it was 
fostered by folly upon the throne. It was guarded 
from wholesome criticism by an intolerant censor- 
ship. It never gave sanity a chance. A certain 
patriotic sentimentality lent itself only too readily 
to the suggestion of the flatterer, and so there grew 
up this monstrous trade in weapons. German pa- 
triotism became an " interest," the greatest of the 
" interests." It developed a vast advertisement 
propaganda. It subsidised Navy Leagues and 
Aerial Leagues, threatening the world. Mankind, 
we saw too late, had been guilty of an incalculable 
folly in permitting private men to make a profit out 
of the dreadful preparations for war. But the evil 
was started ; the German imagination was captured 
and enslaved. On every other European country 
that valued its integtk7i*^here was thrust the over- 
whelming necessity to arm and drill — and still to 
arm and drill. Money was withdrawn from educa- 
tion, from social progress, from business enterprise, 
and art and scientific research, and from every kind 
of happiness; life was drilled and darkened. 



14 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

So that the harvest of this darkness comes now 
almost as a reHef, and it is a grim satisfaction in 
our discomforts that we can at last look across the 
roar and torment of battlefields to the possibility 
of an organised peace. 

For this is now a war for peace. 

It aims straight at disarmament. It aims at a 
settlement that shall stop this sort of thing for 
ever. Every soldier who fights against Germany 
now is a crusader against war. This, the greatest 
of all wars, is not just another war — it is the last 
war! England, France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and 
all the little countries of Europe, are heartily sick 
of war; the Tsar has expressed a passionate hatred 
of war; the most of Asia is unwarlike; the United 
States has no illusions about war. And never was 
war begun so joyously, and never was war begun 
with so grim a resolution. In England, France, 
Belgium, Russia, there is no thought of glory. ; 

We know we face unprecedented slaughter and 
agonies; we know that for neither side will there 
be easy triumphs or prancing victories. Already, 
in that warring sea of men, there is famine as well 
as hideous butchery, and soon there must come dis- 
ease. 

Can it be otherwise? 

We face, perhaps, the most awful winter that 
mankind has ever faced. 

But we English and our allies, who did not seek 



WHY BRITAIN WENT TO WAR 15 

this catastrophe, face it with anger and determina- 
tion rather than despair. 

Through this war we have to march, through 
pain, through agonies of the spirit worse than pain, 
through seas of blood and fiUh. We Enghsh have 
not had things kept from us. We know what war 
is; we have no delusions. We have read books 
that tell us of the stench of battlefields, and the na- 
ture of wounds, books that Germany suppressed and 
hid from her people. And we face these horrors 
to make an end of them. 

There shall be no more Kaisers, there shall be 
no more Krupps, we are resolved. That foolery- 
shall end! 

And not simply the present belligerents must 
come into the settlement. 

All America, Italy, China, the Scandinavian 
Powers, must have a voice in the final readjust- 
ment, and set their hands to the ultimate guaran- 
tees. I do not meafi that they need fire a single 
shot or load a single gun. But they must come in. 
And in particular to the United States do we look 
to play a part in that pacification of the world 
for which our whole nation is working, and for 
which, by the thousand, men are now laying down 
their lives. 



II 
THE SWORD OF PEACE 

'' EVERY SWORD THAT IS DRAWN AGAINST GERMANY 
NOW IS A SWORD DRAWN FOR PEACE " 

Europe is at war! 

The monstrous vanity that was begotten by the 
easy victories of '70 and '71 has challenged the 
world, and Germany prepares to reap the harvest 
Bismarck sowed. That trampling, drilling foolery 
in the heart of Europe, that has arrested civilisation 
and darkened the hopes of mankind for forty years. 
German Imperialism, German militarism, has struck 
its inevitable blow. The victory of Germany will 
mean the permanent enthronement of the War God 
over all human affairs. The defeat of Germany 
may open the way to disarmament and peace 
throughout the earth. 

To those who love peace there can be no other 
hope in the present conflict than the defeat, the utter 
discrediting of the German legend, the ending for 
good and all of the blood and iron superstition, of 
Krupp, flag-wagging Teutonic Kiplingism, and all 
that criminal, sham efficiency that centres in Berlin. 

16 



THE SWORD OF PEACE 17 

Never was war so righteous as war against Ger- 
many now. Never has any State in the world so 
clamoured for punishment. 

But be it remembered that Europe's quarrel is 
with the German State, not with the German people ; 
with a system, and not with a race. The older 
tradition of Germany is a pacific and civilising tra- 
dition. The temperament of the mass of German 
people is kindly, sane and amiable. Disaster to the 
German Army, if it is unaccompanied by any such 
memorable wrong as dismemberment or intolerable 
indignity, will mean the restoration of the greatest 
people in Europe to the fellowship of Western na- 
tions. The role of England in this huge struggle 
is plain as daylight. We have to fight. If only on 
account of the Luxemburg outrage we have to fight. 
If we do not fight, England will cease to be a coun- 
try to be proud of; it will be a dirt-bath to escape 
from. But it is inconceivable that we should not 
fight. And having fought, then in the hour of vic- 
tory it will be for us to save the liberated Germans 
from vindictive treatment, to secure for this great 
people their right, as one united German-speaking 
State, to a place in the sun. 

First we have to save ourselves and Europe, and 
then we have to stand between German on the one 
hand and the Cossack and revenge on the other. 

For my own part, I do not doubt that Germany 
and Austria are doomed to defeat in this war. It 



i8 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

may not be catastrophic defeat, though even that 
is possible, but it is defeat. There is no destiny 
in the stars and every sign is false if this is not so. 

They have provoked an overwhelming combina- 
tion of enemies. They have under-rated France. 
They are hampered by a bad social and military tra- 
dition. The German is not naturally a good sol- 
dier ; he is orderly and obedient, but he is not nimble 
nor quick-witted ; since his sole considerable military 
achievement, his not very lengthy march to Paris in 
1870 and '71, the conditions of modern warfare 
have been almost completely revolutionised and in 
a direction that subordinates the massed fighting of 
unintelligent men to the rapid initiative of individ- 
ualised soldiers. And, on the other hand, since 
those years of disaster, the Frenchman has learnt 
the lesson of humility; he is prepared now sombrely 
for a sombre struggle; his is the gravity that pre- 
cedes astonishing victories. In the air, in the open 
field, with guns and machines, it is doubtful if any- 
one fully realises the superiority of his quality to the 
German. This sudden attack may take him aback 
for^a week or so, though I doubt even that, but in 
the end I think he will hold his own; even without 
us he will hold his own, and with us then I venture 
to prophesy that within three months from now his 
Tricolour will be over the Rhine. And even sup- 
pose his line gets broken by the first rush. Even 
then I do not see how the Germans are to get to 



THE SWORD OF PEACE 19 

Paris or anywhere near Paris. I do not see how 
against the strength of the modern defensive and 
the stinging power of an intelligent enemy in re- 
treat, of which we had a little foretaste in South 
Africa, the exploit of Sedan can be repeated. A 
retiring German army, on the other hand, will be 
far less formidable than a retiring French army, 
because it has less " devil " in it, because it is made 
up of men taught to obey in masses, because its in- 
telligence is concentrated in its aristocratic officers, 
because it is dismayed when it breaks ranks. The 
German army is everything the Conscriptionists 
dreamt of making our people ; it is, in fact, an army 
about twenty years behind the requirements of con- 
temporary conditions. 

On the Eastern frontier the issue is more doubt- 
ful because of the uncertainty of Russian things. 
The peculiar military strength of Russia, a strength 
it was not able to display in Manchuria, lies in its 
vast resources of mounted men. A set invasion of 
Prussia may be a matter of many weeks, but the 
raiding possibilities in Eastern Germany are enor- 
mous. It is difficult to guess how far the Russian 
attack will be guided by intelligence, and how far 
Russia will blunder, but Russia will have to blunder 
very disastrously indeed before she can be put upon 
the defensive. A Russian raid is far more likely 
to threaten Berlin than a German to reach Paris. 

Meanwhile there is the struggle on the sea. In 



20 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

that I am prepared for some rude shocks. The 
Germans have devoted an amount of energy to the 
creation of an aggressive navy that would have 
been spent more wisely in consolidating their Euro- 
pean position. It is probably a thoroughly good 
navy, and ship for ship the equal of our own. But 
the same lack of invention, the same relative un- 
creativeness that has kept the German behind the 
Frenchman in things aerial has made him, regard- 
less of his shallow seas, follow our lead in naval 
matters, and if we have erred, and I believe we have 
erred, in overrating the importance of the big bat- 
tleship, the German has at least very obligingly 
fallen in with our error. The safest, most effec- 
tive, place for the German fleet at the present time 
is the Baltic Sea. On this side of the Kiel Canal, 
unless I overrate the powers of the water-plane, 
there is no safe harbour for it. If it goes into 
port anywhere that port can be ruined, and the 
bottled-up ships can be destroyed at leisure by 
aerial bombs. So that if they are on this side of 
the Kiel Canal they must keep the sea and fight, if 
we let them, before their coal runs short. Battle 
in the open sea in this case is their only chance. 
They will fight against odds, and with every pros- 
pect of a smashing, albeit we shall certainly have 
to pay for that victory in ships and men. In the 
Baltic we shall not be able to get at them without 



THE SWORD OF PEACE 21 

the participation of Denmark, and they may have a 
considerable use against Russia. But in the end 
even there mine and aeroplane and destroyer should 
do their work. 

So I reckon that Germany will be held east and 
west, and that she will get her fleet practically de- 
stroyed. We ought also to be able to sweep her 
shipping off the seas, and lower her flag for ever in 
Africa and Asia and the Pacific. All the prob- 
abilities, it seems to me, point to that. There is no 
reason why Italy should not stick to her present 
neutrality, and there is considerable inducement 
close at hand for both Denmark and Japan to join 
in, directly they are convinced of the failure of the 
first big rush on the part of Germany. All these 
issues will be more or less definitely decided within 
the next two or three months. By that time I be- 
lieve German Imperialism will be shattered, and it 
may be possible to anticipate the end of the arma- 
ments phase of European history. France, Italy, 
England, and all the smaller Powers of Europe are 
now pacific countries; Russia, after this huge war, 
will be too exhausted for further adventure; a 
shattered Germany will be a revolutionary Ger- 
many, as sick of uniforms and the Imperialist idea 
as France was in 1871, as disillusioned about pre- 
dominance as Bulgaria is to-day. The way will be 
open at last for all these Western Powers to organise 



22 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

peace. That is why I, with my declared horror of 
war, have not signed any of these " stop-the-war " 
appeals and declarations that have appeared in the 
last few days. Every sword that is drawn against 
Germany now is a sword drawn for peace. 



Ill 

HANDS OFF THE PEOPLE'S 
FOOD 

This is a war-torn article, a convalescent article. 

It is characteristic of the cheerful gallantry of the 
time that after being left for dead on Saturday 
evening this article should be able, in an only very 
slightly bandaged condition, to take its place in the 
firing-line again on Thursday morning. 

It was first written late on Friday night; it was 
written in a mood of righteous excitement, and it 
was an extremely ineffective article. In the night 
I could not sleep because of its badness, and because 
I did so vehemently want it to hit hard and get its 
effect. I turned out about two o'clock in the morn- 
ing and redrafted it, and the next day I wrote it all 
over again differently and carefully, and I think 
better. In the afternoon it was blown up by the 
discovery that Mr. Runciman had anticipated its 
essential idea. He had brought in, and the House 
had passed through all its stages, a Bill to give the 
Board of Trade power to requisition and deal with 
hoarded or reserved food. That was exactly the 

23 



24 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

demand of my article. My article, about to die, 
saluted this most swift and decisive Government of 
ours. . . . 

Then I perceived that there were still many things 
to be said about this requisitioning of food. The 
Board of Trade has got its powers, but apparently 
they have still to be put into operation. It is ex- 
tremely desirable that there should be a strong pub- 
lic opinion supporting and watching the exercise of 
these powers, and that they should be applied at the 
proper point immediately. The powers Mr. Runci- 
man has secured so rapidly for the Board of Trade 
have to be put into operation; there must be an 
equally rapid development of local committees and 
commandos to carry out his idea. The shortage 
continues. It is not over. The common people, 
who are sending their boys so bravely and uncom- 
plainingly to the front, must be relieved at once 
from the intolerable hardships which a certain sec- 
tion of the prosperous classes, a small section but 
an actively mischievous section, is causing them. 
It is a right ; not a demand for charity. It is ridicu- 
lous to treat the problem in any other way. 

So far the poorer English have displayed an 
amazing and exemplary patience in this crisis, a 
humility and courage that make one the prouder 
for being also English. Apart from any failure of 
employment at the present time, it must be plain to 
anyone who has watched the present rise of prices 



HANDS OFF THE PEOPLE'S FOOD 25 

and who knows anything either at first hand of 
poor households or by reading such investigations 
as those of Mrs. Pember Reeves upon the family 
budgets of the poor, that the rank and file of our 
population cannot now be getting enough to eat. 
They are suffering needless deprivation and also 
they are suffering needless vexation. And there is 
no atom of doubt why they are suffering these dis- 
tresses. It is that pretentious section of the pros- 
perous classes, the section we might hit off with the 
phrase " automobile-driving villadom," the " Tariff 
Reform and damn Lloyd George and Keir Hardie " 
class, the most pampered and least public-spirited of 
any stratum in the community, which has grabbed 
at the food ; it has given way to an inglorious panic ; 
it has broken ranks and stampeded to the stores and 
made the one discreditable exception in the splendid 
spectacle of our national solidarity. 

While the attention of all decent English folk 
has been concentrated upon the preparations for our 
supreme blow at Prussian predominance in Europe, 
villadom has been swarming to the shops, buying up 
the food of the common people, carrying it off in 
the family car (adorned, of course, with a fluttering 
little Union Jack) ; father has given a day from 
business, mother has helped, even those shiny-headed 
nuts, the sons, have condescended to assist, and now 
villadom, feeling a little safer, is ready with the din- 
ner-bell, its characteristic instrument of music, to 



26 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

maffick at the victories it has done its best to spoil. 
And villadom promoted and distended, villadom in 
luck, turned millionaire, villadom on a scale that can 
buy a peerage and write you its thousands-of-pounds 
cheque for a showy subscription list, has been true 
to its origins. Lord Maffick, emulating Mr. and 
Mrs. Maffick, swept his district clean of flour; let 
the thing go down to history. Lord Maffick now 
explains that he bought it to distribute among his 
poorer neighbours — that is going to be the stock 
excuse of these people — but that sort of buying is 
just exactly as bad for prices as buying for Lord 
Maffick's personal interior. The sooner that flour 
gets out of the houses of Lord Maffick and Horatio 
Maffick, Esquire, and young Mr. Maffick and the 
rest of them, and into the houses of their poorer 
neighbours, the better for them and the country. 
The greatest danger to England at the present time 
is neither the German army nor the German fleet, 
but this morally rotten section of our community. 

Now it is no use scolding these people. It is no 
use appealing to their honour and patriotism. 
Honour they have none, and their idea of pa- 
triotism is to " tax the foreigner," wave Union 
Jacks, and clamour for the application to England 
of just that universal compulsory service which 
leads straight to those crowded, ineffective massa- 
cres of common soldiers that are beginning upon the 
German war- front. Exhortation may sway the 



HANDS OFF THE PEOPLE'S FOOD 27 

ninety-and-nine, but the one mean man in the hun- 
dred will spoil the lot. The thing to do now is to 
get to work at once in every locality, requisitioning 
all excessive private stores of food or gold coins — 
they can be settled for after the war — not only the 
stores of the private food-grabbers, but also the 
stores of the speculative wholesalers who are hold- 
ing up prices to the retail shops. Only in that way 
can the operations of this intolerable little minority 
be completely checked. Under every county council 
food committees should be formed at once to re- 
port on the necessities of the general mass and con- 
duct inquiries into hoarding and the seizure and dis- 
tribution of hoards, small and great. 

Now this is a public work calling for the most 
careful and open methods. Food distribution in 
England is partly in the hands of great systems of 
syndicated shops and partly still in the hands of 
one-shop local tradesmen. It is imperative that the 
brightest light should be kept upon the operations 
of both small and large provision dealers. The big 
firms are in the control of men whose business suc- 
cesses have received in many instances marks of the 
signal favour and trust of our rulers. Lord Devon- 
port, for example, is a peer ; Sir Thomas Lipton is a 
baronet ; they are not to be regarded as mere private 
traders, but as men honoured by association with the 
hierarchy of our national life on account of their 
distinguished share in the public food service. It 



28 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

will help them in their quasi-public duties to give 
them the support of our attention. Are they devot- 
ing their enormous economic advantages to keeping 
prices at a reasonable level, or are these various 
systems of syndicated provision shops also putting 
things up against the consumer? With concerted 
action on the part of these stores the most perfect 
control of prices is possible everywhere, except in the 
case of a few out-of-the-way villages. Is it being 
done? Nobody wants to see the names of Lord 
Devonport or Sir Thomas Lipton or the various 
other rich men associated with them in the food sup- 
ply flourishing about on royal subscription lists at 
the present time; their work lies closer at hand. 
What we all want is to feel that they are devoting 
their utmost resources to the public food service 
of which they constitute so important a part. Let 
me say at once that I have every reason to believe 
they are doing it, and that they are alive to the re- 
sponsibilities of their positions. But we must keep 
the limelight on them and on their less honoured 
and conspicuous fellow-merchants. They are play- 
ing as important and vital a part — indeed, they are 
called upon to play as brave and self-sacrificing a 
part — as any general at the front. If they fail 
us it will be worse than the loss of many thousands 
of men in battle. Let us watch them, and I believe 
we shall watch them with admiration. But let us 
watch them. Let us report their movements, ask 



HANDS OFF THE PEOPLE'S FOOD 29 

them to reassure us, chronicle their visits to the 
Board of Trade. 

I will not expatiate upon the possible heroisms 
of the wholesale provision trade. I do but glance 
at the possibility of Lord Devonport or Sir Thomas 
Lipton, after the war, living, financially ruined, but 
glorious, in a little cottage. " I gave back to the 
people in their hour of need what I made from them 
in their hours of plenty," he would say. " I have 
suffered that thousands might not suffer. It is 
nothing. Think of the lads who died in Belgium." 

By all accounts, the small one-shop provision 
dealers are behaving extremely well. In my own 
town of Dunmow I know of two little shopkeepers 
who have dared to offend important customers 
rather than fulfil panic orders. They deserve 
medals. In poor districts many such men are giv- 
ing credit, eking out, tiding over, and all the time 
running tremendous risks. Not all heroes are upon 
the battlefield, and some of the heroes of this wai: 
are now fighting gallantly for our land behind 
grocers' counters and in village general shops, and 
may end, if not in the burial trench, in the bank- 
ruptcy court. Indeed, many of them are already 
on the verge of bankruptcy. The wholesalers have, 
I know, in many cases betrayed them, not simply by 
putting up prices, but by suddenly stopping cus- 
tomary credits, and this last week has seen some dis- 
mal nights of sleepless worry in the little bedrooms 



30 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

over the isolated grocery. While we look to the 
syndicated shops to do their duty, it is of the utmost 
importance also that we should not permit a mas- 
sacre of the small tradespeople. A catastrophe to 
the small shopkeeper at the present time will not 
only throw a multitude of broken men upon public 
resources, but leave a gap in the homely give-and- 
take of back-street and village economies that will 
not be easily repaired. So that I suggest that the 
requisitioned stocks of forestalling wholesalers — 
there ought to be a great bulk of such food-stuff 
already in the hands of the authorities — shall be 
sold in the first instance at wholesale prices to the 
isolated shopkeepers, and not directly to the public. 
Only in the event of a local failure of duty should 
the direct course be taken. 

It must be remembered that the whole of the 
present stress for food is an artificial stress due to 
the vehement selfishness of vulgar-minded prosper- 
ous people and to the base cunning of quite excep- 
tional merchants. But under the strange and diffi- 
cult and planless conditions of to-day quite a few 
people can start a rush and produce an almost ir- 
resistible pressure. The majority of people who 
have hoarded and forestalled have probably done so 
very unwillingly, because " others will do it." They 
would welcome any authoritative action that would 
enable them to disgorge without feeling that some- 
body else would instantly snatch what they had sur- 



HANDS OFF THE PEOPLE'S FOOD 31 

rendered and profit by it. It is for that reason that 
we must at once organise the commandeering and 
requisitioning of hoards and reserved goods. The 
mere threat will probably produce a great relaxa- 
tion of the situation, but the threat must be car- 
ried out to the point of having everything ready as 
soon as possible to seize and sell and distribute. 
Until that is done this food crisis will wax and 
wane, but it will not cease; if we do not carry out 
Mr. Runciman's initiatives with a certain harsh 
promptness food trouble will be an intermittent 
wasting fever in the body politic until the end of 
the war. 

And the business will not be over at the end of 
the war. The patience of the common people has 
been astonishing. In countless homes there must 
have been the extremest worry and misery. But 
except for a few trivial rows, such as the smashing 
of the windows of Mr. Moss, at Hitchin, who was 
probably not a bit to blame, an attack on a bakery 
somewhere, and some not very bad behaviour in 
the way of threats and demonstrations on the part 
of East End Jews, there has been no disorder at 
all. That is because the people are full of the first 
solemnity of war, eagerly trustful, and still — wxll 
nourished. 

At the end unless the more prosperous people pull 
themselves together it will not be like that. 



IV 

CONCERNING MR. MAXIMILIAN 
CRAFTj 

I FIND myseli enthusiastic for this war against 
Prussian miHtarism. We are, I beheve, assisting 
at the end of a vast, intolerable oppression upon 
civilisation. We are fighting to release Germany 
and all the world from the superstition that brutality 
and cynicism are the methods of success, that Im- 
perialism is better than free citizenship and con- 
scripts better soldiers than free men. 

And I find another writer who is also being, he 
declares, patriotically British. Indeed, he waves 
the Union Jack about to an extent from which my 
natural modesty recoils. Because you see I am 
English-cum-Irish, and save for the cross of St. 
Andrew that flag is mine. To wave it about would, 
I feel, be just vulgar self-assertion. He, however, 
is not English. He assumes a variety of names, 
and some are quite lovely old English names. But 
his favourite name is Craft, Maximilian Craft — 
and I understand he was born a Kraft. He shoves 
himself into the affairs of this country with an ex- 

32 



MR. MAXIMILIAN CRAFT 33 

traordlnary energy ; he takes possession of my Union 
Jack as if St. George was his father. At present 
he is advising me very actively how to conduct this 
war, and telHng me exactly what I ought to think 
about it. He is, in fact, the English equivalent of 
those professors of Welt Politik who have guided 
the German mind to its present magnificent display 
of shrewd, triumphant statecraft. I suspect him of 
a distant cousinship with Professor Delbruck. And 
he is urging upon our attention now a magnificent 
coup, with which I will shortly deal. 

In appearance Kraft is by no means completely 
anglicised himself. He is a large-faced creature 
with enormous long features and a woolly head; he 
is heavy in build and with a back slightly hunched ; 
he lisps slightly and his manner is either insolently 
contemptuous or aggressively familiar. He thinks 
all born Englishmen, as distinguished from the nat- 
uralised Englishmen, are also born fools. Always 
his manner is pervaded by a faint flavour of aston- 
ishment at the bom foolishness of the born English- 
men. But he thinks their Empire a marvellous ac- 
cident, a wonderful opportunity — for cleverer peo- 
ple. 

So, with a kind of disinterested energy, he has 

been doing his best to educate Englishmen up to 

^ their Imperial opportunities, to show them how to 

change luck into cunning, take the wall of every 

other breed and swagger foremost in the world. 



34 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

He cannot understand that English blood does not 
warm to such ambitions. When he has wealth it 
is his nature to show it in watch-chains and studs 
and signet-rings; if he had a wife she would dazzle 
in diamonds; the furniture of his flat is wonderfully 
" good," all picked English pieces and worth no 
end; he thinks it is just dulness and poorness of 
spirit that disregards these things. He came to 
England to instruct us in the arts of Empire, when 
he found that already there was a glut of his kind 
of wisdom in the German universities. For years 
until this present outbreak I have followed his ca- 
reer with silent interest rather than affection. And 
the first thing he undertook to teach us was, I 
remember. Tariff Reform, " taxing the foreigner." 
Limitless wealth you get, and you pay nothing. 
You get a huge national income in imported goods, 
and also, as your tariff prevents importation, you 
develop a tremendous internal trade. Two birds 
(in quite opposite directions) with the same stone. 
It seemed just plain common sense to him. Any- 
how, he felt sure it was good enough for the born 
English. . . . 

He is still a little incredulous of our refusal to 
accept that delightful idea. Meanwhile his kind 
have dominated the more docile German intelli- 
gence altogether. They have listened to the whis- 
per of Welt Politik, or at least their rulers have 
attended; they have sown exasperation on every 



MR. MAXIMILIAN CRAFT 35 

frontier, taken the wall, done all the showily aggres- 
sive and successful things. They were the pupils 
he should have taught. A people at once teachable 
and spirited. Almost tearfully Kraft has asked 
us to mark that glorious progress of a once philo- 
sophical, civilised, and kindly people. And indeed 
we have had to mark it and polish our weapons, and 
with a deepening resentment get more and more 
weapons, and keep our powder dry, when we would 
have been far rather occupied with other things. 

But amazingly enough we would not listen to his 
suggestion of universal service. Kraft and his 
kind believe in numbers. Even the Boer War could 
not shake his natural aptitude for political arith- 
metic. He has tried to bring the situation home 
to us by diagrams, showing us enormous figures, 
colossal soldiers to represent the German forces and 
tiny little British men, smaller than the army figures 
for Bulgaria and for Servia. He does not under- 
stand that there can be too many soldiers on a field 
of battle; he could as soon believe that one could 
have too much money. And so he thinks the armies 
of Russia must be more powerful than the French. 
When I deny that superiority — as I do — he simply 
notes the fact that I am unable to count. 

And when it comes to schemes of warfare then 
a kind of delirium of cunning descends upon Kraft. 
He is full of devices such as we poor fools cannot 
invent; sudden attacks without a declaration of 



36 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

war, vast schemes for spy systems and assassin-like 
disguises, the cowing of a country by the wholesale 
shooting of uncivil non-combatants, breaches 
of neutrality, national treacheries, altered dis- 
patches, forged letters, diplomatic lies, a perfect 
world-organisation of Super-sneaks. Our poor 
cousin, Michael, the German, has listened to such 
wisdom only too meekly. Poor Michael, with his 
honest blue eyes wonder-lit, has tried his best to be 
a very devil, and go where Kraft's cousin, Bern- 
hardi, the military "expert," has led him. (So 
far it has led him into the ditches of Liege and the 
gorges of the Ardennes and much hunger and dirt 
and blood.) And Kraft over here has watched 
with an intolerabe envy Berlin lying and bullying 
and being the very Superman of Welt Politik. He 
has been talking, writing, praying us to do like- 
wise, to strike suddenly before war was declared 
at the German fleet, to outrage the neutrality of 
Denmark, to seize Holland, to do something nation- 
ally dishonest and disgraceful. Daily he has raged 
at our milk and water methods. At times we have 
seemed to him more like a lot of .Woodrow Wilsons 
than reasonable sane men. 

And he is still at it. 

Only a few days ago I took up the paper that 
has at last moved me to the very plain declarations 
of this article. It was an English daily paper, and 
Kraft was telling us, as usual, and with his usual 



MR. MAXIMILIAN CRAFT 37 

(despairful sense of our stupidity, how to conduct 
this war. And what he said was this — that we 
have to starve Germany — not reaHsing that with 
her choked railways and her wasted crops Germany 
may be trusted very rapidly to starve herself — and 
that, if we do not prevent them, foodstuffs will go 
into Germany by way of Holland and Italy. So he 
wants us to begin at once a hostile blockade of Hol- 
land and Italy, or better, perhaps, to send each of 
these innocent and friendly countries an ultimatum 
forthwith. He wants it done at once, because 
otherwise the Berlin Krafts, some Delbruck or 
Bernhardi, or that egregious young statesman, the 
Crown Prince, may persuade the Prussians to get 
in their ultimatum first. Then we should have no 
chance of doing anything internationally idiotic at 
all, unless, perhaps, we seized a port in Norway. It 
might be rather a fine thing, he thinks upon reflec- 
tion, to seize a port in Norway. 

Now let us English make it clear, once for all, 
to the Krafts and other kindred patriotic gentlemen 
from abroad who are showing us the really artful 
way to do things, that this is not our way of doing 
things. Into this war we have gone with clean 
hands — to end the reign of brutal and artful inter- 
nationalism for ever. Our hearts are heavy at the 
task before us, but our intention is grim. iWe mean 
to conquer. We are prepared for every disaster, for 
intolerable stresses, for bankruptcy, for hunger, for 



38 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

anything but defeat. Now that we have begun to 
fight we will fight if needful until the children die 
of famine in our homes, we will fight though every 
ship we have is at the bottom of the sea. We mean 
to fight this war to its very finish, and that finish 
we are absolutely resolved must be the end of Kraft- 
ism in the world. And we will come out of this 
war with hands as clean as they are now, unstained 
by any dirty tricks in field or council chamber, neu- 
tralities respected and treaties kept. Then we will 
reckon once for all with Kraft and with his friends 
and supporters, the private dealers in armaments, 
and with all this monstrous, stupid brood of villainy 
that has brought this vast catastrophe upon the 
.world. 

I say this plainly now for myself and for thou- 
sands of silent plain men, because the sooner Kraft 
realises how we feel in this matter the better for 
him. He betrays at times a remarkable persuasion 
that at the final settling up of things he will make 
himself invaluable to us. At diplomacy he knows 
he shines. Then the lisping whisper has its use, and 
the studied insolence. Finish the fighting, and then 
leave it to him. He really believes the born Eng- 
lish will. He does not understand in the slightest 
degree the still passion of our streets. There never 
was less shouting and less demonstration in Eng- 
land, and never was England so quietly intent. 
This war is not going to end in diplomacy; it is 



MR. MAXIMILIAN CRAFT 39 

going to end diplomacy. It is quite a different sort 
of war from any that have gone before it. At, the 
end there will be no Conference of Europe on the 
old lines at all, but a Conference of the World. It 
will be a Conference for Kraft to laugh at. He will 
run about button-holing people about it; almost 
spitting in their faces with the eagerness of his de- 
risive whispers. It will conduct its affairs with 
scandalous publicity and a deliberate simplicity. It 
will be worse than Woodrow Wilson. And it will 
make a peace that will put an end to Kraft and the 
spirit of Kraft and Kraftism and the private arma- 
ment firms behind him for evermore. 

At which I imagine the head of Kraft going down 
between his shoulders and his large hands going 
out like the wings of a cherub. " Englishmen ! 
Liberals! Fools! Incurable! How can such 
things be ? It is not how things are done." 

It is how they are going to be done if this world 
is to be worth living in at all after this war. When 
we fight Berlin, Kraft, we fight you. . . . An ab- 
solute end to you. Yes. 



V 

THE MOST NECESSARY MEAS- 
URES IN THE WORLD 

In this smash-up of empires and diplomacy, this 
utter disaster of international politics, certain things 
which would have seemed ridiculously Utopian a 
few weeks ago have suddenly become reasonable 
and practicable. One of these, a thing that would 
have seemed fantastic until the very moment when 
we joined issue with Germany and which may now 
be regarded as a sober possibility, is the absolute 
abolition throughout the world of the manufacture 
of weapons for private gain. Whatever may be 
said of the practicability of national disarmament, 
there can be no dispute not merely of the possibility 
but of the supreme necessity of ending for ever the 
days of private profit in the instruments of death. 
That is the real enemy. That is the evil thing at 
the very centre of this trouble. 

At the very core of all this evil that has burst 
at last in world disaster lies this Kruppism, this 
sordid enormous trade in the instruments of death. 
It is the closest, most gigantic organisation in the 

40 



MOST NECESSARY MEASURES 41 

world. Time after time this huge business, with its 
bought newspapers, its paid spies, its agents, its 
shareholders, its insane sympathisers, its vast rami- 
fication of open and concealed associates, has de- 
feated attempts at pacification, has piled the heap of 
explosive material higher and higher — the heap 
that has toppled at last into this bloody welter in 
Belgium, in which the lives of four great nations 
are now being torn and tormented and slaughtered 
and wasted beyond counting, beyond imagining. I 
dare not picture it — thinking now of who may 
read. 

So long as the unstable peace endured, so long 
as the Emperor of the Germans and the Krupp con- 
cern and the vanities of Prussia hung together, 
threatening but not assailing the peace of the world, 
so long as one could dream of holding off the crash 
and saving lives, so long was it impossible to bring 
this business to an end or even to propose plainly 
to bring this business to an end. It was still pos- 
sible to argue that to be prepared for war was the 
way to keep the peace. But now everyone knows 
better. The war has come. Preparation has ex- 
ploded. Outrageous plunder has passed into out- 
rageous bloodshed. All Europe is in revolt against 
this evil system. There is no going back now to 
peace; our men must die, in heaps, in thousands; 
we cannot delude ourselves with dreams of easy 
victories; we must all suffer endless miseries and 



42 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

anxieties; scarcely a human affair is there that 
will not be marred and darkened by this war. Out 
of it all must come one universal resolve : that this 
iniquity must be plucked out by the roots. What- 
ever follies still lie ahead for mankind this folly at 
least must end. There must be no more buying 
and selling of guns and warships and war-machines. 
There must be no more gain in arms. Kings and 
Kaisers must cease to be the commercial travellers 
of monstrous armament concerns. With the 
Goehen the Kaiser has made his last sale. What- 
ever arms the nations think they need they must 
make for themselves and give to their own subjects. 
Beyond that there must be no making of weapons 
in the earth. 

This is the clearest common sense. I do not need 
to argue what is manifest, what every German 
knows, what every intelligent educated man in the 
world knows. The Krupp concern and the tawdry 
Imperialism of Berlin are linked like thief and re- 
ceiver; the hands of the German princes are dirty 
with the trade. All over the world statecraft and 
royalty have been approached and touched and 
tainted by these vast firms, but it is in Berlin that 
the corruption has centred, it is from Berlin that 
the intolerable pressure to arm and still to arm has 
come, it is at Berlin alone that the evil can be 
grappled and killed. Before this there was no 
reaching it. It was useless to dream even of dis- 



MOST NECESSARY MEASURES 43 

armament while these people could still go on mak- 
ing their material uncontrolled, waiting for the mo- 
ment of national passion, feeding the national mind 
with fears and suspicions through their subsidised 
Press. But now there is a new spirit in the world. 
There are no more fears; the worst evil has come 
to pass. The ugly hatreds, the nourished miscon- 
ceptions of an armed peace, begin already to give 
place to the mutual respect and pity and disillusion- 
ment of a universally disastrous war. We can at 
last deal with Krupps and the kindred firms through- 
out the world as one general problem, one world- 
wide accessible evil. 

Outside the circle of belligerent States, and the 
States which, like Denmark, Italy, Rumania, Nor- 
way and Sweden, must necessarily be invited to 
take a share in the final re-settlement of the world's 
affairs, there are only three systems of Powers 
which need be considered in this matter, namely, the 
English and Spanish-speaking Republics of Amer- 
ica and China. None of these States is deeply in- 
volved in the armaments trade, several of them have 
every reason to hate a system that has linked the 
obligation to deal in armaments with every loan. 
The United States of America is now, more than 
ever it was, an anti-militarist Power, and it is not 
too much to say that the Government of the United 
States of America holds in its hand the power to 
sanction or prevent this most urgent need of man- 



44 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

kind. If the people of the United States will con- 
sider and grasp this tremendous question now; if 
they will make up their minds now that there shall be 
no more profit made in America or anywhere else 
upon the face of the earth in raw material; if they 
will determine to put the vast moral, financial and 
material influence the States will be able to exer- 
cise at the end of this war in the scale against the 
survival of Kruppism, then it will be possible to 
finish that vile industry for ever. If, through a 
failure of courage or imagination, they will not 
come into this thing, then I fear if it may be done. 
But I misjudge the United States if, in the end, they 
abstain from so glorious and congenial an oppor- 
tunity. 

Let me set out the suggestion very plainly. All 
the plant for the making of war material through- 
out the world must be taken over by the Govern- 
ment of the State in which it exists; every gun fac- 
tory, every rifle factory, every dockyard for the 
building of warships. It may be necessary to com- 
pensate the shareholders more or less completely; 
there may have to be a war indemnity to provide 
for that, but that is a question of detail. The thing 
is the conversion everywhere of arms-making into 
a State monopoly, so that nowhere shall there be a 
ha'porth of avoidable private gain in it. Then, and 
then only, will it become possible to arrange for the 
gradual dismantling of this industry which is de- 



MOST NECESSARY MEASURES 45 

stroying humanity, and the reduction of the armed 
forces of the world to reasonable dimensions. I 
would carry this suppression down even to the re- 
striction of the manufacture and sale of every sort 
of gun, pistol, and explosive. They should be made 
only in Government workshops and sold only in 
Government shops ; there should not be a single rifle, 
not a Browning pistol, unregistered, unrecorded, and 
untraceable in the world. But that may be a coun- 
sel of perfection. The essential thing is the world 
suppression of this abominable traffic in the big 
gear of war, in warships and great guns. 

With this corruption cleared out of the way, with 
the armaments commercial traveller flung down the 
back-stairs he has haunted for so long — and flung 
so hard that he will be incapacitated for ever — it 
will become possible to consider a scheme for the 
establishment of the peace of the world. Until that 
is done any such scheme will remain an idle dream. 
But him disposed of, the way is open for the as- 
sociation of armed nations, determined to stamp out 
at once every recrudescence of aggressive war. 
They will not be totally disarmed Powers. It is no 
good to disarm while any one single Power is still 
in love with the dream of military glory. It is no 
good to disarm while the possibility of war fever is 
still in the human blood. The intelligence of the 
whole world must watch for febrile symptoms and 
prepare to allay them. But after this struggle one 



46 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

may count on the pacific intentions of at least the 
following States: The British Empire, France, 
Italy, and all the minor States of the north and 
west; the United States has always been a pacific 
Power; Japan has had its lesson and is too im- 
poverished for serious hostilities; China has never 
been aggressive ; Germany also, unless this war leads 
to intolerable insults and humiliations for the Ger- 
man spirit, will be war-sick. The Spanish and 
Portuguese-speaking Republics of America are too 
busy developing materially to dream of war on the 
modern scale, and the same may presently be true 
of the Greek, Latin and Slav communities of south- 
east Europe if, as I hope and believe, this war leads 
to the rational rearrangement of the Austro-Hun- 
garian Empire. 191 5 will indeed find this world 
a strangely tamed and reasonable world. 

There is only one doubtful country, Russia, and 
for my own part I do not believe in the wickedness 
and I doubt the present power of that stupendous 
barbaric State. Finland and a renascent Polish 
kingdom at least will be weight on the side of peace. 
It will be indeed the phase of supreme opportunity 
for peace. If there is courage and honesty enough 
in men, I believe it will be possible to establish a 
world council for the regulation of armaments as 
the natural outcome of this war. First, the trade 
in armaments must be absolutely killed. And then 
the next supremely important measure to secure the 



MOST NECESSARY MEASURES 47 

peace of the world is the neutralisation of the 
5ea. 

It will lie in the power of England, France, Rus- 
sia, Italy, Japan and the United States, if Germany 
and Austria are shattered in this war, to forbid the 
further building of any more ships of war at all; 
to persuade, and if need be, to oblige the minor 
Powers to sell their navies and to refuse the seas 
to armed ships not under the control of the con- 
federation. To launch an armed ship can be made 
an invasion of the common territory of the world. 
This will be an open possibility in 191 5. It will re- 
main an open possibility until men recover from the 
shock of this conflict. As that begins to be for- 
gotten so this will cease to be a possibility again — 
perhaps for hundreds of years. Already human in- 
telligence and honesty have contrived to keep the 
great American lakes and the enormous Canadian 
frontier disarmed for a century. Warlike folly has 
complained of that, but it has never been strong 
enough to upset it. What is possible on that scale 
is possible universally, so soon as the armament 
trader is put out of mischief. And with the Con- 
federated Peace Powers keeping the seas and guar- 
anteeing the peaceful freedom of the seas to all 
mankind, treating the transport of armed men and 
war material, except between one detached part of 
a State and another, as contraband, and impartially 
blockading all belligerents, those who know best the 



48 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

significance of the sea power will realise best the re- 
duction in the danger of extensive wars on land. 

This is no dream. This is the plain common 
sense of the present opportunity. 

It may be urged that this is a premature discus- 
sion, that this war is still undecided. But, indeed, 
there can be no decision to this war for France and 
England at any rate but the defeat of Germany, the 
abandonment of German militarism, the destruction 
of the German fleet, and the creation of this oppor- 
tunity. Nothing short of that is tolerable; we must 
fight on to extinction rather than submit to a dis- 
honouring peace in defeat or to any premature set- 
tlement. The fate of the world under triumphant 
Prussianism and Kruppism for the next two hun- 
dred years is not worth discussing. There is no 
conceivable conclusion to this war but submission at 
Berlin. There is no reasonable course before us 
now but to give all our strength for victory and the 
establishment of victory. The end must be victory 
or our efifacement. What will happen after our 
effacement is for the Germans to consider. 

A war that will merely beat Germany a little and 
restore the hateful tensions of the last forty years 
is not worth waging. As an end to all our effort 
it will be almost as intolerable as defeat. Yet un- 
less a body of definite ideas is formed and promul- 
gated now things may happen so. And so now, 
while there is yet time, the Liberalism of France 



MOST NECESSARY MEASURES 49 

and England must speak plainly and make its appeal 
to the Liberalism of all the world, not to share our 
war indeed, but to share the great ends for which 
we are so gladly waging this war. For, indeed, 
sombrely enough England and France and Belgium 
and Russia are glad of this day. The age of armed 
anxiety is over. Whatever betide, it must be an 
end. And there is no way of making it an end but 
through these two associated decisions, the aboli- 
tion of Kruppism and the neutralisation of the sea. 



VI 

THE NEED OF A NEW 
MAP OF EUROPE 

At the moment of writing the war has not lasted 
many days, great battles by land and sea alike im- 
pend, and yet I find my steadfast anticipation that 
Prussianism, Bernhardi-ism, the whole theory and 
practice of the Empire of the Germans, is a rotten 
and condemned thing, has already strengthened to 
an absolute conviction. Unforeseen accidents may 
happen. I say nothing of the sea, but the general 
and ultimate result seems to me now as certain as 
the rising of to-morrow's sun. I do not know how 
much slaughter lies before Europe before Germany 
realises that she is fool-led and fool-poisoned. I 
do not know how long the swaggering Prussian of- 
ficer will be able to drive his crowded men to mas- 
sacre before they revolt against him, nor do I know 
how far the inflated vanity of Berlin has made pro- 
vision for defeat. Germany on the defensive for 
all we can tell may prove a very stubborn thing, and 
Russia's strength may be, and I think is, over- 
estimated. All that may delay, but it will not alter 

50 



A NEW MAP OF EUROPE 51 

the final demonstration that Prussianism, as Mr. 
Belloc foretold so amazingly, took its mortal wound 
at the first onset before the trenches of Liege. We 
begin a new period of history. 

It is not Germany that has been defeated; Ger- 
many is still an unconquered country. Indeed, now 
it is a released country. It is a country glorious in 
history and with a glorious future. But never more 
after this war has ended will it march to the shout 
of the Prussian drill sergeant and strive to play 
bully to the world. The legend of Prussia is ex- 
ploded. Its appeal was to one coarse criterion, suc- 
cess, and it has failed. Nevermore will the harsh- 
ness of Berlin overshadow the great and friendly 
civilisation of Southern and Western Germany. 
The work before a world in arms is to clean off the 
Prussian blue from the life and spirit of mankind. 

No European Power has any real quarrel with 
Germany. Our quarrel is with the Empire of the 
Germans, not with a people but with an idea. Let 
us in all that follows keep that clearly in our minds. 
It may be that the German repulse at Liege was but 
the beginning of a German disaster as great as that 
of France in 187 1. It may be that Germany has no 
second plan if her first plan fails; that she will go 
to pieces after her first defeat. It seems to me 
that this is so — I risk the prophecy, and I would 
have us prepare ourselves for the temptations of 
victory. And so to begin with, let us of the liberal 



52 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

faith declare our fixed, unalterable conviction that 
it will be a sin to dismember Germany or to allow 
any German-speaking and German- feeling terri- 
tory to fall under a foreign yoke. Let us English 
make sure of ourselves in that matter. There may 
be restorations of alien territory — Polish, French, 
Danish, Italian, but we have seen enough of racial 
subjugation now to be sure that we will tolerate no 
more of it. From the Rhine to East Prussia and 
from the Baltic to the southern limits of German- 
speaking Austria, the Germans are one people. 
Let us begin with the resolution to permit no new 
bitterness of " conquered territories " to come into 
existence to disturb the future peace of Europe. 
Let us see to it that at the ultimate settlement the 
Germans, however great his overthrow may be, are 
all left free men. 

When the Prussians invaded Luxemburg they 
tore up the map of Europe. To the redrawing of 
that map a thousand complex forces will come. 
There will be much attempted over-reaching in the 
business and much greed. Few will come to nego- 
tiations with simple intentions. In a wrangle all 
sorts of ugly and stupid things may happen. It is 
for us English to get a head in that matter, to take 
counsel with ourselves and determine what is just; 
it is for us, who are in so many ways detached from 
and independent of the national passions of the 
Continent, not to be cunning or politic, but to con- 



A NEW MAP OF EUROPE 53 

trive as unanimous a purpose as possible now, so 
that we may carry this war to its end with a clear 
conception of its end, and to use the whole of our 
^strength to make an enduring peace in Europe. 
That means that we have to re-draw the map so that 
there shall be, for just as far as we can see ahead, 
as little cause for warfare among us Western na- 
tions as possible. That means that we have to re- 
draw it justly. And very extensively. 

Is that an impossible proposal? I think not. 
There are, indeed, such things as non-irritating 
frontiers. Witness the frontiers of Canada. Cer- 
tain boundaries have served in Europe now for the 
better part of a hundred years, and grow less amen- 
able to disturbance every year. Nobody, for ex- 
ample, wants to use force to readjust the mutual 
frontiers in Europe of Holland, Belgium, France, 
Spain, Portugal and Italy, and none of these Powers 
desire now to acquire the foreign possessions of any 
other of the group. They are Powers permanently 
at peace. Will it not be possible now to make so 
drastic a readjustment as to secure the same prac- 
tical contentment between all the European Pow- 
ers? Is not this war that crowning opportunity? 
It seems to me that in this matter it behoves 
us to form an opinion sane and definite enough to 
meet the sudden impulses of belligerent triumph 
and override the secret counsels of diplomacy. It 
is a thing to do forthwith. Let us decide what we 



54 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

are going on fighting for, and let us secure it and 
settle it. It is not an abstract interesting thing to 
do; it is the duty of every English citizen now to 
study this problem of the map of Europe, so that 
we can make an end for ever to that dark game of 
plots and secret treaties and dap-trap synthetic 
schemes that has wasted the forces of civilisation 
(and made the fortunes of the Krupp family) in 
the last forty years. We are fighting now for a 
new map of Europe if we are fighting for anything 
at all. I could imagine that new map of Europe 
as if it were the flag of the allies who now prepare 
to press the Germans back towards their proper 
territory. 

In the first place, I suggest that France must 
recover Lorraine, and that Luxemburg must be 
linked in closer union with Belgium. Alsace, it 
seems to me, should be given a choice between 
France and an entry into the Swiss Confederation. 
It would possibly choose France. Denmark should 
have again the distinctly Danish part of her lost 
provinces restored to her. Trieste and Trent, and 
perhaps also Pola, should be restored to Italy. 
This will re-unite several severed fragments of peo- 
ples to their more congenial associates. But these 
are minor changes compared with the new develop- 
ments that are now, in some form, inevitable in the 
East of Europe, and for those we have to nerve 
our imaginations, if this vast war and waste of 



A NEW MAP OF EUROPE SS 

men is to end in an enduring peace. The break-up 
of the Austrian Empire has hung over Europe Hke 
a curse for forty years. Let us break it up now 
and have done v^ith it. What is to become of the 
non-German regions of Austria-Hungary? And 
what is to happen upon the PoHsh frontier of 
Russia ? 

First, then, I would suggest that the three frag- 
ments of Poland should be reunited, and that the 
Tsar of Russia should be crowned King of Poland. 
I propose then we define that as our national in- 
tention, that we use all the liberalising influence 
this present war will give us in Russia to that end. 
And secondly, I propose that we set before our- 
selves as our policy the unification of that larger 
Rumania which includes Transylvania, and the 
gathering together into a confederation of the 
Swiss type of all the Servian and quasi-Servian 
provinces of the Austrian Empire. Let us, as the 
price greater Servia will pay for its unity, exact 
the restoration to Bulgaria of any Bulgarian-speak- 
ing districts that are now under Servian rule; let 
us save Scutari from the iniquity of a nose-slash- 
ing occupation by Montenegrins and try to effect 
another Swiss confederation of the residual Bo- 
hemian, Slavic and Hungarian fragments. I am 
convinced that the time has come for the substitu- 
tion of Swiss associations for the discredited Im- 
perialisms and kingdoms that have made Europe 



56 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

unstable for so long. Every emperor and every 
king, we now perceive, means a national ambition 
more organic, concentrated and dangerous than is 
possible under Republican conditions. Our own 
peculiar monarchy is the one exception that proves 
this rule. There is no reason why we should mul- 
tiply these centres of aggression. 

Probably neither Bulgaria nor Servia would miss 
their kings very keenly, and anyhow, I do not see 
any need for more of these irritating ambition- 
pimples upon the fair face of the world. Let us 
cease to give indigestible princes to the new States 
that we Schweitzerize. Albania, particularly, with 
its miscellaneous tribes has certainly no use for 
monarchy, and the suggestion that has been made 
for its settlement, as a confederation of small tribal 
cantons is the only one I have ever heard that 
seemed to contain a ray of hope for that distracted 
patch of earth. There is certainly no reason why 
these people should be exploited by Italy, since Italy 
can claim a more legitimate gratification. There, 
in a paragraph, is a sketch of the map of Europe 
that may emerge from the present struggle. It is 
my personal idea of our purpose in this war. 

Quite manifestly in all these matters I am a fairly 
ignorant person. Quite manifestly this is crude 
stuff. And I admit a certain sense of presumptu- 
ous absurdity as I sit here before the map of Eu- 
rope like a carver before a duck and take off a slice 



A NEW MAP OF EUROPE 57 

here and decide on a cut there. None the less it is 
. what everyone of us has to do. I intend to go on 
redrawing the map of Europe with every inteUigent 
person I meet. We are all more or less ignorant; 
it is unfortunate but it does not alter the fact that 
we cannot escape either decisions or passive ac- 
quiescences in these matters. If we do not do our 
utmost to understand the new map, if we make no 
decisions, then still cruder things will happen; Eu- 
rope will blunder into a new set of ugly compli- 
cations and prepare a still more colossal Armaged- 
don than this that is now going on. No one, I 
hope, will suggest after this war that we should 
still leave things to the diplomatists. Yet the al- 
ternative to you and me is diplomacy. If you want 
to see where diplomacy and Welt Politik have 
landed Europe after forty years of anxiety and 
armament, you must go and look into the ditches 
of Liege. These bloody heaps are the mere first 
samples of the harvest. The only alternative to 
diplomacy is outspoken intelligence, yours and mine 
and every articulate person's. We have all of us 
to undertake this redrawing of the map of Europe, 
in the measure of our power and capacity. That 
our power and capacity are unhappily not very con- 
siderable does not absolve us. It is for us to secure 
a lasting settlement of all the European frontiers 
if we can. If we common intelligent people at 
large do not secure that, nobody will. 



58 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

If we have no intentions with regard to the map 
of Europe, we shall soon be going on with the 
war for nothing in particular. The Prussian spirit 
has broken itself beyond repair, and the north coast 
of France and the integrity of Belgium are saved. 
All the fighting that is still to come will only be 
the confirmation and development of that. If we 
have no further plan before us our task is at an 
end. If that is all, we may stand aside now with 
a good conscience and watch a slower war drag to 
an evil end. Left to herself a victorious Russia is 
far more likely to help herself to East Prussia and 
set to work to Russianise its inhabitants than to 
risk an indigestion of more Poles; Italy may go into 
Albania and a new conflict with Servia; it is even 
conceivable that France may be ungenerous. She 
will have a good excuse for being ungenerous. 
Meanwhile, German-speaking populations will find 
themselves under instead of upper dogs in half the 
provinces of Austria-Hungary; mischievous little 
kings, with chancellors and national policies and 
ambitions all complete, will rise and fluctuate and 
fall upon that slippery soil, and a bloody and em- 
bittered Germany, continually stung by the outcries 
of her subject kindred, will sit down grimly to grow 
a new generation of soldiers and prepare for her 
revenge. . . . 

That is why I think we liberal English should 



A NEW MAP OF EUROPE 59 

draw our new map of Europe now, first of all on 
paper and then upon the face of the earth. 

We ought to draw that map now, and propagate 
the idea of it, and make it our national purpose, 
and call the intelligence and consciences of the 
United States and France and Scandinavia to our 
help. Openly and plainly we ought to discuss and 
decide and tell the world what we mean to do. 
The reign of brutality, cynicism, and secretive 
treachery is shattered in Europe. Over the ruins 
of the Prussian War-Lordship, reason, public opin- 
ion, justice, international good faith and good in- 
tentions will be free to come back and rule the des- 
tinies of man. But things will not wait for rea- 
son and justice, if just and reasonable men have 
neither energy nor unity. 



VII 

THE OPPORTUNITY OF 
LIBERALISM 

The opportunity of Liberalism has come at last, 
an overwhelming opportunity. The age of mili- 
tarism has rushed to its inevitable and yet surpris- 
ing climax. The great soldier empire, made for 
war, which has dominated Europe for forty years 
has pulled itself up by the roots and flung itself 
into the struggle for which it was made. Whether 
it win or lose, it will never put itself back again. 
All Europe, following that lead, is a-field for war. 
The good harvests stand neglected, the factories 
are idle, a thin, uncertain trickle of paper money 
replaces the chinking flow of commerce; whichever 
betide, defeat or deadlock, the capitalist military 
civilisation uproots itself and ends. The war may 
burn itself out more quickly than those who regard 
its immensity think, but the war itself is the mere 
smash of the thing. The reality is the uprooting, 
the incurable dislocation. 

Trying to map and measure that dislocation is 
rather like one's first effort to think in sun's dis- 

60 



OPPORTUNITY OF LIBERALISM 61 

tances. It is to transfer one's mind to a new and 
overwhelming scale. Never did any time carry so 
swift a burthen of change as this time. It is mani- 
fest that in a year or so the world of men is going 
to alter more than it has altered in the last century 
and a half, more indeed than it ever altered before 
these last centuries since history began. Think 
of the mere geographical dislocation. There is 
scarcely a country in Europe that will not emerge 
from this struggle with entirely fresh frontiers, 
sovereign powers will vanish from the map, new 
sovereign powers will come. In the disorders that 
are upon us and of which this war itself is the mere 
preliminary phase in uniform, inevitably there must 
be social reconstruction. Who can doubt it? 
Who can doubt the break-up of confidence and 
usage that is in progress? Plainly you can see 
famine coming — in France, in Germany, in Rus- 
sia. Does anyone suppose that those sham efficient 
Germans have fully worked out the care and feed- 
ing of the madly distended hosts they have hurled 
at France? Does anyone dream that they have 
reckoned for a check and halt? Does anyone im- 
agine their sanitary arrangements are perfect? 
There will be pestilence. And can one beheve that 
whatever feats of financial fiction we contrive, 
their financial crash can be staved off, and that the 
bankers of Hamburg and Frankfort are likely to 
be shovelling gold next January in a still methodical 



62 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

world? The German State machine has probably 
already done all that it was ever made to do. It 
stands now exhausted amidst the turmoil of its con- 
sequences. Its mobilization arrangements are said 
to have been astonishingly complete. Ten million 
men for and against have been got into the field — 
with ammunition. Prussian Germany has carried 
out its arrangements and committed the business to 
Gott. German foresight has exhausted itself. If 
Gott fail Germany, I do not believe that Germany 
has the remotest idea what to do next. For the 
most part those millions will never get home any 
more. They will certainly never get back to their 
work again, because it will have disappeared. 

When I think of European statecraft presently 
trying to put all these things back again I am re- 
minded of a story of a friend whose neighbour tried 
to cut his throat and then repented. He came 
round to her with a towel about his neck making 
peculiar noises. It was a distressing but illuminat- 
ing experience for her. She was a plucky and re- 
sourceful woman, and she did her best. " There 
was such a lot of it,'' she said. " I hadn't an idea 
things were packed so tight in us." 

It is characteristic of such times as this — that 
much in the world, and, more particularly, much 
in the minds of men, much that has seemed as in- 
vincible as the mountains and as deeply rooted as 
the sea, magically loses its solidity, fades, changes, 



OPPORTUNITY OF LIBERALISM 63 

vanishes. When one looked at the map of Europe 
a month ago most of the Hnes of its frontiers 
seemed ahnost as stable as the coastlines. Now 
they waver under one's eyes. When one thought 
of the heritage of the Crown Prince of Germany, 
it seemed as fixed as a constellation, and now in a 
little while it may be worth as little as a bloody rag 
in the trenches of Liege. In little things as in 
great, one is suddenly confronted by undreamt-of 
instabilities. The Reform Club, which has been a 
cheerful and refreshing trickle of gold to me for 
years, now yields me reluctantly for my cheque two 
inartistic pound notes. My other club has ceased 
the kindly custom of cashing cheques altogether. 
One is glad that poor Bagehot did not live to see 
this day. Each day now I marvel to wake and 
find I have still a banker. . . . And I perceive too, 
that if presently my banker dissolved into the rest 
of this dissolving world — a thing I should have 
thought an unendurable calamity a month ago — 
I shall laugh and go on. . . . Ideas that have ruled 
life as though they were divine truths are being 
chased and slaughtered in the streets. The rights 
of property, for example, the sturdy virtues of in- 
dividualism, all toleration for the rewards of ab- 
stinence, vanished last week suddenly amidst the 
execrations of mankind upon a hurrying motor-car 
loaded with packages of sugar and flour. They 
bolted, leaving Socialism and Collectivism in pos- 



64 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

session. The State takes over flour mills and the 
food supply, not merely for military purposes, but 
for the general welfare of the community. The 
State controls the railways with a sudden complete 
disregard of shareholders. There is not even a let- 
ter to the Times to object. If the State sees fit 
to keep its hold upon these things for good, or 
loosens its hold only to improve its grip, I question 
if there is very much left in the minds of men, even 
after the mere preliminary sweeping of the last two 
v/eeks, to dispute possession. Society as we knew 
it a year ago has indeed already broken up; it has 
lost all real cohesion; only the absence of any at- 
traction elsewhere keeps us bunched together. 
We keep our relative positions because there is 
nowhither to stampede. Dazed, astonished people 
fill the streets; and we talk of the national calm. 
The more intelligent men thrown out of their jobs 
make for the recruiting offices, because they have 
nothing else to do; we talk of the magnificent re- 
sponse to Lord Kitchener's appeal. Everybody is 
offering services. Everybody is looking for some- 
one to tell him what to do. It is not organisation; 
it is the first phase of dissolution. 

I am not writing prophecies now, and I am not 
" displaying imagination." I am just running as 
hard as I can by the side of the marching facts, 
and pointing to them. Institutions and conven- 
tions crumble about us, and release to unprece- 



OPPORTUNITY OF LIBERALISM 65 

dented power the two sorts of rebel that ordinary- 
times suppress, will and ideas. 

The character of the new age that must come 
out of the catastrophies of this epoch will be no 
mechanical consequence of inanimate forces. Will 
and ideas will take a larger part in this .yzmV/-ahead 
than they have even taken in any previous collapse. 
No doubt the mass of mankind will still pour along 
the channels of chance, but the d'esire for a new 
world of a definite character will be a force, and 
if it is multitudinously unanimous enough, it may 
even be a guiding force, in shaping the new time. 
The common man and base men are scared to 
docility. Rulers, pomposities, obstructives are sud- 
denly apologetic, helpful, asking for help. This is 
a time of incalculable plasticity. For the men who 
know what they want, the moment has come. It 
is the supreme opportunity, the test or condemna- 
tion of constructive liberal thought in the world. 

Now what does Liberalism mean to do? It has 
always been alleged against Liberalism that it is 
carpingly critical, disorganised, dispersed, imprac- 
ticable, fractious, readier to " resign " and " rebel " 
than help. That is the common excuse of all mod- 
ern autocracies, bureaucracies, and dogmatisms. 
Are they right? Is Liberal thought in this world- 
crisis going to present the spectacle of a swarm of 
little wrangling men swept before the mindless be- 
som of brute accident, or shall we be able in this 



66 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

vast collapse or re-birth of the world, to produce 
and express ideas that will rule? Has it all been 
talk ? Or has it been planning ? Is the new world, 
in fact, to be shaped by the philosophers or by the 
Huns? 

First, as to peace. Do Liberals realise that now 
is the time to plan the confederation and collective 
disarmament of Europe, now is the time to re-draw 
the map of Europe so that there may be no more 
rankling sores or unsatisfied national ambitions? 
Are the Liberals as a body going to cry " Peace ! 
Peace ! " and leave the questions alone, or are they 
going to take hold of them ? If Liberalism through- 
out the world develops no plan of a pacified world 
until the diplomatists get to work, it will be too late. 
Peace may come to Europe this winter as swiftly 
and disastrously as the war. 

And next, as to social reconstruction. Do Lib- 
erals realise that the individualist capitaHst system 
is helpless nowf It may be picked up unresist- 
ingly. It is stunned. A new economic order may be 
improvised and probably will in some manner 'be 
improvised in the next two or three years. What 
are the intentions of Liberalism? What will be 
the contribution of Liberalism? One poor Liberal, 
I perceive, is possessed, to the exclusion of every 
other consideration, by the idea that we were not 
legally bound to fight for Belgium. A pretty 
point, but a petty one. Liberalism is something 



OPPORTUNITY OF LIBERALISM 67 

greater than unfavourable comment on the deeds 
of active men. Let us set about defining our in- 
tentions. Let us borrow a little from the rash 
vigour of the types that have contrived this dis- 
aster. Let us make a truce of our finer feelings 
and control our dissentient passions. Let us re- 
draw the map of Europe boldly, as we mean it to be 
re-drawn, and let us re-plan society as we mean it 
to be reconstructed. Let us get to work while 
there is still a little time left to us. Or while our 
futile fine intelligences are busy, each with its par- 
ticular exquisitely-felt point, the Northcliffes and 
the diplomatists, the Welt-Politik whisperers, and 
the financiers, and militarists, the armaments inter- 
ests, and the Cossack Tsar, terrified by the inevi- 
table red dawn of leaderless social democracy, by 
the beginning of the stupendous stampede that will 
follow this great jar and displacement, will surely 
contrive some monstrous blundering settlement, and 
the latter state of this world will be worse than the 
former. 

Now is the opportunity to do fundamental things 
that will otherwise not get done for hundreds of 
years. If Liberals throughout the world — and in 
this matter the Liberalism of America is a stu- 
pendous possibility — will insist upon a World con- 
ference at the end of this conflict, if they refuse all 
partial settlements and merely European solutions, 
they may re-draw every frontier they choose, they 



68 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

may reduce a thousand chafing conflicts of race and 
language and government to a minimum, and set up 
a Peace League that will control the globe. The 
world will be ripe for it. And the world will be 
ripe, too, for the banishment of the private indus- 
try in armaments and all the vast corruption that 
entails from the earth for ever. It is possible now 
to make an end to Kruppism. It may never be 
possible again. Henceforth let us say weapons 
must be made by the State, and only by the State ; 
there must be no more private profit in blood. 
That is the second great possibility for Liberalism, 
linked to the first. And, thirdly, we may turn our 
present social necessities to the most enduring so- 
cial reorganization; with an absolute minimum of 
effort now, we may help to set going methods and 
machinery that will put the feeding and housing of 
the population and the administration of the land 
out of the reach of private greed and selfishness for 
ever. 



VIII 
THE LIBERAL FEAR OF RUSSIA 

It is evident that there is a very considerable 
dread of the pov^er and intentions of Russia in 
this country. It is well that the justification of 
this dread should be discussed now, for it is likely 
to affect the attitude of British and American Lib- 
eralism very profoundly, both towards the con- 
tinuation of the war and towards the ultimate set- 
tlement. 

It is, I believe, an exaggerated dread arising out 
of our extreme ignorance of Russian realities. 
English people imagine Russia to be more pur- 
poseful than she is, more concentrated, more inimi- 
cal to Western civilisation. They think of Russian 
policy as if it were a diabolically clever spider in 
a dark place. They imagine that the tremendous 
unification of State and national pride and ambi- 
tion which has made the German Empire at last 
insupportable, may presently be repeated upon an 
altogether more gigantic scale, that Pan-Slavism will 
take the place of Pan-Germanism, as the ruling ag- 
gression of the world. 

69 



70 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

This is a dread due, I am convinced, to funda- 
mental misconceptions and hasty paralleHsms. 
Russia is not only the vastest country in the world, 
but the laxest; she is incapable of that tremendous 
unification. Not for two centuries yet, if ever, will 
it be necessary for a reasonably united Western 
Europe to trouble itself, once Prussianism has been 
disposed of, about the risk of definite aggression 
from the East. I do not think it will ever have to 
trouble itself. 

Socially and politically, Russia is an entirely 
unique structure. It is the fashion to talk of Rus- 
sia as being " in the fourteenth century," or " in 
the sixteenth century." As a matter of fact, Rus- 
sia, like everything else, is in the twentieth century, 
and it is quite impossible to find in any other age a 
similar social organisation. In bulk, she is bar- 
baric. Between eighty and ninety per cent, of her 
population is living at a level very little above the 
level of those agricultural Aryan races who were 
scattered over Europe before the beginning of writ- 
ten history. It is an illiterate population. It is 
superstitious in a primitive way, conservative and 
religious in a primitive way, it is incapable of pro- 
tecting itself in the ordinary commerce of modern 
life; against the business enterprise of better edu- 
cated races it has no weapon but a peasant's poor 
cunning. It is, indeed, a helpless, unawakened 
mass. Above these peasants come a few millions 



LIBERAL FEAR OF RUSSIA 71 

of fairly well-educated and actively intelligent peo- 
ple. They are all that corresponds in any way to 
a Western community such as ours. Either they 
are officials, clerical or lay, in the great government 
machine that was consolidated chiefly by Peter the 
Great to control the souls and bodies of the peasant 
mass, or they are private persons more or less re- 
sentfully entangled in that machine. At the head 
of this structure, with powers of interference 
strictly determined by his individual capacity, is 
that tragic figure, the Tsar. That, briefly, is the 
composition of Russia, and it is unlike any other 
State on earth. It will follow laws of its own and 
have a destiny of its own. 

Involved with the affairs of Russia are certain 
less barbaric States. There is Finland, which is 
by comparison highly civilised, and Poland, which 
is not nearly so far in advance of Russia. Both 
these countries are perpetually uneasy under the 
blundering pressure of foolish attempts to " Rus- 
sianize " them. In addition, in the South and East 
are certain provinces thick with Jews, whom Rus- 
sia can neither contrive to tolerate nor assimilate, 
who have no comprehensible projects for the help 
or reorganisation of the country, and who deafen 
all the rest of Europe with their bitter, unhelpful 
tale of grievances, so that it is difficult to realise 
how local and partial are their wrongs. There is 
a certain " Russian idea," containing within itself 



72 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

all the factors of failure, inspiring jthe general 
policy of this vast amorphous State. It found its 
completest expression in the works of the now de- 
funct Pobedonostsev, and it pervades the bureau- 
cracy. It is obscurantist, denying the common peo- 
ple education; it is orthodox, forbidding free 
thought and preferring conformity to ability; it is 
bureaucratic and autocratic; it is Pan-Slavic, Rus- 
sianizing, and aggressive. It is this " Russian 
idea " that Western Liberalism dreads, and, as I 
want to point out, dreads unreasonably. I do not 
want to plead that it is not a bad thing; it is a bad 
thing. I want to point out that, unlike Prussian- 
ism, it is not a great danger to the world at large. 
So long as this Russian idea, this Russian Tory- 
ism, dominates Russian affairs, Russia can never 
be really formidable either to India, to China, or 
to the Liberal nations of Western Europe. And 
whenever she abandons this Toryism and becomes 
modern and formidable, she will cease to be aggres- 
sive. That is my case. While Russia has the will 
to oppress the world she will never have the power ; 
when she has the power she will cease to have the 
will. Let me state my reasons for this belief as 
compactly as possible, because if I am right a num- 
ber of Liberal-minded people in Great Britain and 
America and Scandinavia, who may collectively 
have a very great influence upon the settlement of 
Europe that will follow this war, are wrong. They 



LIBERAL FEAR OF RUSSIA 73 

may want to bolster up a really dangerous and evil 
Austria-cum-Germany at the expense of France, 
Belgium, and subject Slav populations, because of 
their dread of this Russia which can never be at 
the same time evil and dangerous. 

Now, first let me point out what the Boer War 
showed, and what this tremendous conflict in Bel- 
gium is already enforcing, that the day of the un- 
intelligent common soldier is past; that men who 
are animated and individualised can, under modern 
conditions, fight better than men who are unintelli- 
gent and obedient. Soldiering is becoming more 
specialised. It is calling for the intelligent han- 
dling of weapons so elaborate and destructive that 
great masses of men in the field are an encumbrance 
rather than a power. Battles must spread out, 
and leading give place to individual initiative. 
Consequently Russia can only become powerful 
enough to overcome any highly civilised European 
country by raising its own average of education and 
initiative, and this it can do only by abandoning 
its obscurantist methods, by liberalising upon the 
Western European model. That is to say, it will 
have to teach its population to read, to multiply its 
schools, and increase its universities; and that will 
make an entirely different Russia from this one we 
fear. It involves a relaxation of the grip of or- 
thodoxy, an alteration of the intellectual outlook 
of officialdom, an abandonment of quasi-religious 



74 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

autocracy — in short, the complete abandonment of 
the " Russian idea " as we know it. And it means 
also a great development of local self -consciousness. 
Russia seems homogeneous now, because in the 
mass it is so ignorant as to be unaware of its dif- 
ferences; but an educated Russia means a Russia 
in which Ruthenian and Great Russian, Lett and 
Tartar will be mutually critical and aware of one 
another. The existing Russian idea will need to 
give place to an entirely more democratic, tolerant, 
and cosmopolitan idea of Russia as a whole, if 
Russia is to merge from its barbarism and remain 
united. There is no cheap " Deutschland, Deutsch- 
land liber alles " sentiment ready-made to hand. 
National quality is against it. Patience under pa- 
triotism is a German weakness. Russians could no 
more go on singing and singing, " Russia, Russia 
over all,'' than Englishmen could go on singing 
" Rule, Britannia." It would bore them. The 
temperament of none of the Russian peoples justi- 
fies the belief that they will repeat on a larger scale 
even as much docility as the Germans have shown 
under the Prussians. No one who has seen the 
Russians, who has had opportunities of comparing 
Berlin with St. Petersburg or Moscow, or who 
knows anything of Russian art or Russian litera- 
ture, will imagine this naturally wise, humourous, 
and impatient people reduplicating the self-con- 
scious drill-dulled, soulless culture of Germany, or 



LIBERAL FEAR OF RUSSIA 75 

the political vulgarities of Potsdam. This is a ter- 
rible world, I admit, but Prussianism is the sort of 
thing that does not happen twice. 

Russia is substantially barbaric. Who can 
deny it? State-stuff rather than a State. But 
people in Western Europe are constantly writing 
of Russia and the Russians as though the qualities 
natural to barbarism were qualities inherent in the 
Russian blood. Russia massacres, sometimes even 
with official connivance. But Russia in all its his- 
tory has no massacres so abominable as we gentle 
English were guilty of in Ireland in the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries. Russia, too, " Rus- 
sianizes," sometimes clumsily, sometimes rather 
successfully. But Germany has sought to Ger- 
manise — in Bohemia and Poland, for instance, 
with conspicuous violence and failure. We 
" Anglicised " Ireland. These forcible efforts to 
create uniformity are natural to a phase of social 
and political development, from which no people 
on earth have yet fully emerged. And if we set 
ourselves now to create a reunited Poland under the 
Russian crown, if we bring all the great influence of 
the Western Powers to bear upon the side of the 
liberalising forces in Finland, if we do not try to 
thwart and stifle Russia by closing her legitimate 
outlet into the Mediterranean, we shall do infinitely 
more for human happiness than if we distrust her, 
check her, and force her back upon the barbarism 



76 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

from which, with a sort of Wind pathetic wisdom, 
she seeks to emerge. 

It is unfortunate for Russia that she has come 
into conspicuous conflict with the Jews. She has 
certainly treated them no worse than she has treated 
her own people, and she has treated them less atro- 
ciously than they were treated in England during the 
Middle Ages. The Jews by their particularism in- 
vite the resentment of all uncultivated humanity. 
Civilisation and not revolt emancipates them. And 
while Russian reverses will throw back her civilisa- 
tion and intensify the sufferings of all her subject 
Jews, Russian success in this alliance will inevitably 
spell Westernisation, progress, and amelioration for 
them. But unhappily this does not seem to be 
patent to many Jewish minds. They have been em- 
bittered by their wrongs, and, in the English and 
still more in the American Press, a heavy weight of 
grievance against Russia finds voice, and distorts 
the issue of this. While we are still only in the 
opening phase of this struggle for life against the 
Prussianised German Empire, this struggle to es- 
cape from the militarism that has been slowly 
strangling civilisation, it is a huge misfortune that 
this racial resentment, which, great as it is, is still a 
little thing beside the world issues involved, should 
break the united front of western civilisation, and 
that the confidence of Russia should be threatened, 



LIBERAL FEAR OF RUSSIA 77 

as it is threatened now by doubt and disparagement 
in the Press. We are not so sure of victory that 
we can estrange an ally. We have to make up our 
minds to see all Poland reunited under the Russian 
Crown, and if the Turks choose to play a foolish 
part, it is not for us to quarrel now about the fate 
of Constantinople. The Allies are not to be 
tempted into a quarrel about Constantinople. The 
balance of power in the Balkans, that is to say, in- 
cessant intrigue between Austria and Russia, has 
arrested the civilisation of South-eastern Europe 
for a century. Let it topple. An unchallenged 
Russia will be a wholesome check, and no great 
danger for the new greater Servia and the new 
greater Rumania and the enlarged and restored Bul- 
garia this war renders possible. 

One civilised country only does Russia really 
" threaten," and that country is Sweden. Sweden 
has a vast wealth of coal and iron within reach of 
Russia's hand. And I confess I watch Scandi- 
navia with a certain terror during these days. 
Sweden is the only European country in which 
there is a pro-German militarist party, and she may 
be tempted — I do not know how strongly she may 
not have been tempted already — to drag herself 
and Norway into this struggle on the German side. 
If she does, our Government will be not a little to 
blame for not having given her, and induced Russia 



78 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

to give her, the strongest joint assurances and 
guarantees of her integrity for ever. But if the 
Scandinavian countries abstain from any participa- 
tion in this present war, then I do not see what is 
to prevent us and France and Russia from making 
the most pubHc, definite, and binding declaration of 
our common interest in Sweden's integrity and our 
common determination to preserve it. 

Beyond that, I see no danger to civilisation in 
Russia anywhere — at least, no danger so consid- 
erable as the Kaiser-Krupp power we fight to finish. 
This war, even if it brings us the utmost success, 
will still leave Russia face to face with a united and 
chastened Germany. For it must be remembered 
that the downfall of Prussianism and the break-up 
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, will leave Ger- 
man Germany not smaller but larger than she is 
now. To India, decently governed and guarded, 
with an educational level higher than her own, and 
three times her gross population, Russia can only 
be dangerous through the grossest misgovernment 
on our part, and her powers of intervention in 
China will be restricted for many years. But all 
our powers of intervention in China will be re- 
stricted for many years. A breathing space for 
Chinese reconstruction is one of the most immediate 
and least equivocal blessings of this war. Unless 
the Chinese are unteachable — and only stupid peo- 
ple suppose them a stupid race — the China of 1934 



LIBERAL FEAR OF RUSSIA 79 

will not be a China for either us or Russia to med- 
dle with. So where in all the world is this danger 
from Russia? 

The danger of a Krupp-cum-Kaiser dominance 
of the whole world, on the other hand, is imme- 
diate. Defeat, or even a partial victory for the 
Allies, means nothing less than that. 



IX 

AN APPEAL TO THE AMERICAN 
PEOPLE 

This appeal comes to you from England at war, 
and it is addressed to you because upon your na- 
tion rests the issue of this conflict. The influence 
of your States upon its nature and duration must 
needs be enormous, and at its ending you may play 
a part such as no nation has ever played since the 
world began. 

For it rests with you to establish and secure 
or to refuse to establish and secure the permanent 
peace of the world, the final ending of war. 

This appeal comes to you from England, but it is 
no appeal to ancient associations or racial affinities. 
Your common language is indeed English, but your 
nation has long since outgrown these early links, 
the blood of every people in Europe mingles in the 
unity of your States, and it is to the greatness of 
your future rather than the accidents of your first 
beginnings, to the humanity in you, and not to the 
English and Irish and Scotch and Welsh in you 
that this appeal is made. Half the world is at war, 

80 



TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 81 

or on the very verge of war; it is impossible that you 
should disregard or turn away from this conflict. 
Unavoidably you have to judge us. Unavoidable 
is your participation in the ultimate settlement 
which will make or mar the welfare of mankind 
for centuries to come. We appeal to you to judge 
us, to listen patiently to our case, to exert the huge 
decisive power you hold in the balance not hastily, 
not heedlessly. For we do not disguise from our- 
selves that you can shatter all our hopes in this 
conflict. You are a people more than twice as nu- 
merous as we are, and still you are only the begin- 
ning of what you are to be, with a clear prospect of 
expansion that mocks the limits of these little 
islands, with illimitable and still scarcely tapped 
sources of wealth and power. You have already 
come to a stage when a certain magnanimity be- 
comes you in your relation to European affairs. 

Now, while you, because of your fortunate posi- 
tion, and because of the sane and brotherly relations 
that have become a fixed tradition along your north- 
ern boundary — we English had a share in securing 
that — while you live free of the sight and burthen 
of military preparations, free as it seems for ever, 
all Europe has for more than half a century bent 
more and more wearily under a perpetually increas- 
ing burthen of armaments. For many years 
Europe has been an armed camp, with millions of 
men continually under arms, with the fear of war 



82 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

universally poisoning its life, with its education im- 
poverished, its social development retarded, with 
everything pinched but its equipment for war. It 
would be foolish to fix the blame for this state of 
affairs upon any particular nation ; it has grown up, 
as most great evils grow, quietly, unheeded. One 
may cast back in history to the Thirty Years' War, 
to such names as Frederick the Great, Napoleon 
the First, Napoleon the Third, Bismarck ; what does 
it matter now who began the thing, and which was 
most to blame? Here it is, and we have to deal 
with it. 

But we English do assert that it is the Government 
of the German Emperor which has for the last 40 
years taken the lead and forced the pace in these 
matters, which has driven us English to add war- 
ship to warship in a pitiless competition to retain 
that predominance at sea upon which our existence 
as a free people depends, and which has strained the 
strength of France almost beyond the pitch of hu- 
man endurance, so that the education and the wel- 
fare of her people have suffered greatly, so that 
Paris to-day is visibly an impoverished and over- 
taxed city. And this perpetual fear of the armed 
strength of Germany has forced upon France al- 
liances and entanglements she would otherwise have 
avoided. 

Let us not attempt to deny the greatness of Ger- 
many and of Germany's contributions to science 



TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 83 

and art and literature and all that is good in human 
life. But evil influences may overshadow the finest 
peoples, and it is our case that since the victories 
of 1 87 1 Germany has been obsessed by the worship 
of material power and glory and scornful of right- 
eousness; that she has been threatening and over- 
bearing to all the world. There has been a propa- 
ganda of cynicism and national roughness, a declared 
contempt for treaties and pledges, so that all Europe 
has been uneasy and in fear. And since none of us 
are saints, and certainly no nations are saintly, we 
have been resentful ; there is not a country in Europe 
that has not shown itself resentful under this per- 
petual menace of Germany. And now at last and 
suddenly the threatened thing has come to pass and 
Germany is at war. 

Because of a murder committed by one of her 
own subjects Austria made war upon Servia, Rus- 
sia armed to protect a kindred country, and then 
with the swiftness of years of premeditation Ger- 
many declared war upon Russia and struck at 
France, striking through the peaceful land of Bel- 
gium, a little country we English had pledged our- 
selves to protect, a little country that had never given 
Germany the faintest pretext for hostility, and in 
the hope of finding France unready. Of course, 
we went to war. If we had not done so, could we 
English have ever looked the world in the face 
again ? 



84 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

And it is with scarcely a dissentient voice that 
England is at war. Never were the British people 
so unanimous; all Ireland is with us, and the con- 
science of all the world. And, now this war has be- 
gun, we are resolved to put an end to militarism 
in the world for evermore. We are not fighting 
to destroy Germany; it is the firm resolve of Eng- 
land to permit no fresh " conquered provinces " to 
darken the future of Europe. Whatever betide, all 
German Germany will come out of this war un- 
divided and German still. Her own " conquests " 
she may have to relinquish, her Poles and other sub- 
ject peoples, but that is the utmost we shall exact of 
her. With the accession of Austria, Germany may 
even come out of this war a larger Germany than 
at the beginning. We have no hatred of things 
German and German people. But we are fight- 
ing to break this huge fighting machine for ever — 
this fighting machine which has been such an op- 
pression as no native-born American can dream of, 
to every other nation in Europe. We are fighting 
to end Kaiserism and Kruppism* for ever and ever. 
There, shortly and plainly, is our case and our ob- 
ject. Now let us come to the immediate substance 
of this appeal. 

We do not ask you for military help. Keep the 
peace which it is your unparalleled good fortune to 
enjoy so securely. But keep it fairly. Remember 
that we fight now for national existence, and that in 



TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 85 

the night, even as this is written, within a hundred 
miles or so of this place, the dark ships feel their 
way among the floating mines with which the Ger- 
mans have strewn the North Sea, and our sons and 
the sons of Belgium and France go side by side, not 
by the hundred nor by the thousand, but by the 
hundred thousand, rank after rank, line beyond line 
— to death. Even as this is written the harvest of 
death is being reaped. Remember our tragic case. 
Europe is full of a joyless determination to end this 
evil for ever ; she plunges grimly and sadly into the 
cruel monstrosities of war, and assuredly there will 
be little shouting for the victors whichever side may 
win. At the end we do most firmly believe there 
will be established a new Europe, a Europe riddened 
of rankling oppressions, with a free Poland, a free 
Finland, a free Germany, the Balkans settled, the 
little nations safe, and peace secure. And it is of 
supreme importance that we should ask you now — 
What are you going to do throughout the struggle, 
and what will you do at the end ? 

One thing we are told in England that you mean 
to do, a thing that has moved me to this appeal. 
For it is not only a strange thing in itself, but it 
may presently be followed by~ other similar ideas. 
Come what may, all the liberal forces in England 
and France are resolved to respect the freedom of 
Holland. But the position of Holland is, as you 
may see in any atlas, a very peculiar one in this war, 



86 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

The Rhine runs along the rear of the long German 
line as if it were a canal to serve that line with sup- 
plies, and then it passes into Holland and so by Rot- 
terdam to the sea. So that it is possible for any 
neutral power, such as you are, to pour a stream of 
food supplies and war material by way of Holland 
almost into the hands of the German combatant line. 
Even if we win our battles in the field this will enor- 
mously diminish our chance of concluding this war. 
But we shall suffer it ; it is within the rights of Hol- 
land to victual the Germans in this way, and we can- 
not prevent it without committing just such another 
outrage upon the laws of nations as Germany was 
guilty of in invading Belgium. 

And here is where your country comes in. In 
your harbours lie a great number of big German 
ships that dare not venture to sea because of our 
fleet. It is proposed, we are told, to arrange a pur- 
chase of these ships by American citizens, to facili- 
tate by special legislation their transfer to your flag, 
and then to load them with food and war material 
and send them across the Atlantic and through the 
narrow seas, seas that at the price of a cruiser and 
many men we have painfully cleared of German 
contact mines, to get war prices in Rotterdam and 
supply our enemies. It is, we confess, a smart 
thing to do; it will give your people not only huge 
immediate profits but a mercantile marine at one 
coup; it will certainly prolong the war, and so it 



TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 87 

will mean the killing and wounding of scores of 
thousands of young Germans, Englishmen, French- 
men, and Belgians, who might otherwise have es- 
caped. It is within your legal rights, and we will 
tell you plainly now that we shall refuse to quarrel 
with you about it, but we ask you not to be too 
easily offended if we betray a certain lack of en- 
thusiasm for this idea. 

And begun such enterprises as this, what are you 
going to do for mankind and the ultimate peace of 
the world? You know that the Tsar has restored 
the freedom of Finland and promised to re-unite the 
torn fragments of Poland into a free kingdom, but 
probably you do not know that he and England have 
engaged themselves to respect and protect from each 
other and all the world the autonomy of Norway 
and Sweden, and of Sweden's vast and tempting 
stores of mineral wealth close to the Russian bound- 
ary. We ask you not to be too cynical about the 
Tsar's promises, and to be prepared to help us and 
France and him to see that they become real. And 
this with regard to Scandinavia, is not only Rus- 
sia's promise but ours. This is more than a war of 
armies ; it is a great moral upheaval, and you must 
not judge of the spirit of Europe to-day by the his- 
tory of her diplomacies. When this war is ended, 
all Europe will cry for disarmament. Are you go- 
ing to help then or are you going to thwart that 
cry ? In Europe we shall attempt to extinguish that 



88 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

huge private trade in war material, that " Krupp- 
ism " which lies so near the roots of all this mon- 
strous calamity. We cannot do that unless you do 
it too. Are you prepared to do that? Are you 
prepared to come into a conference at the end of 
this war to ensure the peace of the world, or are you 
going to stand out, make difficulties for us out of 
our world perplexities, snatch advantages, carp 
from your infinite security at our Allies, and per- 
haps in the crisis of our struggle pick a quarrel with 
us upon some secondary score? Are you indeed 
going to play the part of a merely numerous little 
people, a cute trading, excitable people, or are you 
going to play the part of a great nation in this life 
and death struggle of the old world civilisations? 
Are you prepared now to take that lead among the 
nations to which your greatness and freedom point 
you? It is not for ourselves we make this appeal 
to you; it is for the whole future of mankind. And 
we make it with the more assurance because already 
your Government has stood for peace and the ob- 
servation of treaties against base advantages. 
Already the wounds of our dead cry out to you. 



X 

COMMON SENSE AND THE 
BALKAN STATES 

The Balkan States never have been a problem, 
they have only been a part of a problem. That is 
why no human being has ever yet produced even a 
paper solution acceptable to another human being. 

The attempt to settle Balkan affairs with the 
Austro-Hungarian Empire left out of the problem 
has been like an attempt to deal with a number of 
hospital cases in which the head and shoulders of 
one patient, the legs of another, the abdomen of a 
third had to be disregarded. The bulk of the Ser- 
vian people and a great mass of the Rumanians were 
in the Austro-Hungarian system, and it was the 
Austrian bar to any development of Servia towards 
the Adriatic that forced that country back into its 
unhappy conflict with Bulgaria. Now everything 
has altered. English people need trouble no longer 
about Austrian susceptibilities, and not merely our 
interests but our urgent necessities march with the 
reasonable ambitions of the four Balkan nations. 

Let us begin by clearing away a certain amount of 
89 



90 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

nonsense that is said and believed by many good 
people about two of these States. It is too much 
the custom to speak and write of Servia and Bul- 
garia as though they were almost hopelessly bar- 
baric and criminal communities, incapable of par- 
ticipation in the fellowship of European nations. 
The murder of the late King and Queen of Servia, 
the assassination of Serajevo, the foolish onslaught 
of Bulgaria upon Servia that led to the break-up of 
the Balkan League, and the endless cruelties and 
barbarities of the warfare in Macedonia, are al- 
lowed to weigh too much against the clear need of 
a reunited Greater Servia, a restored Bulgaria, and 
the reasonable prospect of a rehabilitated Balkan 
League. 

Now there is no getting over the hard facts of 
these crimes and cruelties. But they have to be 
kept in their proper proportion to the tremendous 
issues now before the world. Let us call in a few 
figures that will fix the scale. The Servian people 
number altogether over ten millions, the Ruma- 
nians as many, there are more than twenty million 
Poles, and perhaps seven millions Bulgarians. The 
Czechs and Slovenes total six or seven millions, the 
Magyars exceed ten millions, and the Ruthenians 
still under Austrian control four millions. It is 
manifest to every reasonable Englishman now that 
very few of these sixty or seventy million people 
are likely to be socially and politically happy until 



THE BALKAN STATES 91 

they have got themselves disentangled from inti- 
mate subjection to alien rulers speaking unfamiliar 
tongues, and it is equally manifest that until they 
are reasonably content, the peace of the rest of 
Europe will remain uncertain. So that it is upon 
these regions that the peace of England, France, 
Germany, Russia and Italy rests. 

The lives, therefore, of hundreds of millions of 
people must be affected, for good or evil, by the 
sane re-mapping and pacification of south-eastern 
Europe. In that sane re-mapping and pacification 
we are, in fact, dealing with matters so gigantic 
that the mere assassination of this person or the 
murder of that dwindles almost to the vanishing 
point. It is surely preposterous that the murder of 
an unwise young King, who subordinated his na- 
tion's destinies to a romantic love affair, a murder 
done, not by a whole nation, not even by a mob, but 
by less than a hundred officers, who were at least as 
patriotic as they were cruel, or even the net of con- 
spiracy that killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, 
should stand in the way of the liberation and unity 
of millions of Serbs who were as innocent of these 
things as any Wiltshire farmer. All nations have 
had their criminal and sanguinary phase; the Brit- 
ish and American people who profess such a horror 
of Servia's murders and Bulgaria's massacres must 
be blankly ignorant of the history of Scotland and 
Ireland and the darker side of the Red Indians' des- 



92 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

tiny. If murder conspiracy was hatched in Servia, 
were there no Fenians in Ireland and America? 
We EngHsh, at any rate, have not let the highly- 
organised Phoenix Park murders drown the free- 
dom of Ireland for ever, or cause a war with Amer- 
ica. The sooner we English and Americans clear 
our minds of this self-righteous cant against the 
whole Servian race because of a few horrors inevi- 
table in a state of barbaric disturbance, the sooner 
we shall be able to help these peoples forward to the 
freedom and security that alone can make such bar- 
barities impossible. It would be just as reasonable 
to vow undying hatred and pitiless vengeance 
against the whole German-speaking race (of sev- 
enty millions or so) because of the burning and 
killing in Liege. Stifled nations, outraged races, 
are the fortresses of resentful cruelty. This war 
is no cinematograph melodrama. The deaths of 
Queen Draga and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand 
are scarcely in this picture at all. It is not the busi- 
ness of statecraft to avenge the past, but to deal 
with the possibilities of the present and the hope of 
the future. 

And the open possibility of the present is for us 
to bring about a revival of the Balkan League, and 
identify ourselves with the reasonable hopes of these 
renascent peoples. In that revival England may 
play an active and directing part. The break-up of 
the first Balkan League was a deep disappointment 



THE BALKAN STATES 93 

to liberal opinion throughout the world; but it was 
not an irrevocable disaster. The wonder was, in- 
deed, not the rupture but the union. And the rup- 
ture itself was very largely due to the thwarting of 
Servia, not by her associates, but by Austria. Now 
Austria is out of consideration. For Rumania and 
for each of the three Balkan Powers, there is a plain, 
honourable and reasonable advantage in a common 
agreement and concerted action with us now. 
There are manifest compensations for Greece in 
Epirus and the islands and — we can spare it — 
Cyprus. For Bulgaria there is a generous recti- 
fication of Macedonia. The natural expansion of 
the two northern States has been already indicated. 
And should Turkey be foolish and blunder at this 
crisis, then further very natural and quite desirable 
readjustments become possible. What holds these 
States back from concerted action on our side now, 
is merely the distrusts and enmities left over from 
the break-up of the first Balkan League. They will 
not readily trust one another again. But they 
would trust England. They would sit down now 
at a conference in which England and Russia and 
Italy were represented, and to which England and 
Russia and Italy would bring assurances of a per- 
manent settlement and arrange every detail of their 
prospective boundaries in a day. They would ar- 
range a peace that would last a century. England 
could do more than reconcile: she could finance. 



94 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

And the attack upon Vienna and the German rear 
would then be reinforced immediately by six or 
seven hundred thousand seasoned soldiers. 

Moreover, it is scarcely possible that Italy could 
refuse to come into this war if a reunited Balkan 
League did so. With the Servians in Dalmatia it 
would be scarcely possible to keep the Italians out 
of Trieste and Fiume, and long before that ear- 
nestly awaited Russian avalanche won its way to 
Berlin, this southern attack might be in Vienna. 
The time when the scope of this war could be re- 
stricted is past long ago, and every fresh soldier 
who goes into action now shortens the agony of 
Europe. 

But it is not with the immediate military ad- 
vantages of a Balkan League that I am most con- 
cerned. A Balkan League of Peace, for mutual 
protection, will be an absolute necessity in a re- 
generated Europe. It is necessary for the tran- 
quillity of the world. It is necessary if the Wilt- 
shire farmer is to herd his sheep in peace ; it is neces- 
sary if people are to be prosperous and happy in 
Chicago and Yokohama. Perhaps " Balkan 
League " is now an insufficiently extensive word, 
since Rumania is not in the Balkan Peninsula, and 
Italy must necessarily be involved in any enduring 
settlement. But it is clear that the settlement of 
Europe upon liberal lines involves the creation of 
these various ten-to-twenty-million-people States, 



THE BALKAN STATES 95 

none of them powerful enough to be secure alone, 
but amounting in the aggregate to the greatest power 
in Europe, and it is equally clear that they must be 
linked by some common bond and understanding. 

There can be no doubt of the very serious compli- 
cation of all these possibilities by the jerry-built 
dynastic interests that have been unhappily run up 
in these new States. It is unfortunate that we have 
to reckon not only with peoples but kings. Such 
a m.onarchy as that of Servia or Bulgaria narrows, 
personifies, intensifies and misrepresents national 
feeling. National hatreds and national ambitions 
can no doubt be at times very malign influences in 
the world's affairs, but it is the greed and vanities 
of exceptional monarchs, of the Napoleons and 
Fredericks the Great, and so forth, that bring these 
vague, vast feelings to an edge and a crisis. And 
it will be these same concentrated and over indi- 
vidualised purposes, these little gods of the coin and 
postage stamp that will stand most in the way of a 
reasonable Schweitzerisation and pacification of 
south-eastern Europe. The more clearly this is 
recognised in Europe now, the less likely are they, 
the less able will they be to obstruct a sane settle- 
ment. On our side, at least, this is a war of nations 
and not of princes. 

It is for that reason that we have to make the 
discussion of these national arrangements as open 
and public as we possibly can. This is not a mat- 



96 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

ter for the quiet little deals of the diplomatists. 
This is no chance for kings. All the civilised peo- 
ples of the earth have to form an idea of the general 
lines upon which a pacific Europe can be established, 
an idea clear and powerful enough to prevent and 
override the manoeuvres of the chancelleries. The 
nations themselves have to become the custodians 
of the common peace. In Italy, indeed, this is al- 
ready the case. The Italian monarchy is a strong 
and Liberal monarchy, secure in the confidence of 
its people; but were it not so, it is a fairly evident 
fact that no betrayal by its rulers would induce the 
Italian people to make war upon France in the in- 
terests of Austria and Prussia. I doubt, too, if the 
present King of Bulgaria can afford to blunder 
again. The world moves steadily away from the 
phase of Court-centred nationalism to the phase of 
a collective national purpose. It is for the whole^ 
strength of western liberalism to throw itself upon 
the side of that movement, and in no direction can 
it make its strength so effective at the present time 
as in the open and energetic promotion of a new and 
greater Balkan League. 



►XI 
THE WAR OF THE MIND 

All the realities of this war are things of the 
mind. This is a conflict of cultures, and nothing 
else in the world. All the world-wide pain and 
weariness, fear and anxieties, the bloodshed and de- 
struction, the innumerable torn bodies of men and 
horses, the stench of putrefaction, the misery of 
hundreds of millions of human beings, the waste of 
mankind, are but the material consequences of a 
false philosophy and foolish thinking. We fight 
not to destroy a nation, but a nest of evil ideas. 

We fight because a whole nation has become 
obsessed by pride, by the cant of cynicism and the 
vanity of violence, by the evil suggestion of such 
third-rate writers as Gobineau and Stewart Cham- 
berlain that they were a people of peculiar excel- 
lence destined to dominate the earth, by the base 
offer of advantage in cunning and treachery held 
out by such men as Delbruck and Bernhardi, by the 
theatricalism of the Kaiser, and by two stirring 
songs about Deutschland and the Rhine. These 
things, interweaving with the tradesmen's activities 
of the armaments trust and the common vanity and 

97 



98 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

weaknesses of unthinking men, have been sufficient 
to release disaster — we do not begin to measure 
the magnitude of the disaster. On the back of it 
all, spurring it on, are the idea-mongers, the base- 
spirited writing men, pretentious little professors 
in frock coats, scribbling colonels. They are the 
idea. They pointed the way and whispered " Go ! " 
They ride the world now to catastrophe. It is as 
if God in a moment of wild humour had lent his 
whirlwinds for an outing to half-a-dozen fleas. 

And the real task before mankind is quite beyond 
the business of the fighting line, the simple awful 
business of discrediting and discouraging these 
stupidities by battleship, artillery, rifle and the blood 
and courage of seven million men. The real task 
of mankind is to get better sense into the heads of 
these Germans, and therewith and thereby into the 
heads of humanity generally, and to end not simply 
a war, but the idea of war. What printing and 
writing and talking have done, printing and writing 
and talking can undo. Let no man be fooled by 
bulk and matter. Rifles do but kill men, and fresh 
men are born to follow them. Our business is to 
kill ideas. The ultimate purpose of this war is prop- 
aganda, the destruction of certain beliefs, and the 
creation of others. It is to this propaganda that 
reasonable men must address themselves. 

And when I write propaganda, I do not for a mo- 
ment mean the propaganda with which the name of 



THE WAR OF THE MIND 99 

Mr. Norman Angell is associated ; this great modern 
gospel that war does not pay. That is indeed the 
only decent and attractive thing that can still be 
said for war. Nothing that is really worth having 
in life does pay. Men live in order that they may 
pay for the unpaying things. Love does not pay, 
art does not pay, happiness does not pay, honesty is 
not the best policy, generosity invites the ingratitude 
of the mean; what is the good of this huckster's 
argument? It revolts all honourable men. But 
war, whether it pay or not, is an atrociously ugly 
thing, cruel, destroying countless beauties. Who 
cares whether war pays or does not pay, when one 
thinks of some obstinate Belgian peasant woman 
being interrogated and shot by a hectoring German 
officer, or of the weakly whimpering mess of 
some poor hovel with little children in it, struck by 
a shell? Even if war paid twelve-and-a-half per 
cent, per annum for ever on every pound it cost to 
w^age, would it be any the less a sickening abomina- 
tion to every decent soul? And, moreover, it is a 
bore. It is an unendurable bore. War and the 
preparation for war, the taxes, the drilling, the in- 
terference with every free activity, the arrest and 
stiffening up of life, the obedience to third-rate peo- 
ple in uniform, of which Berlin-struck Germans 
have been the implacable exponents, have become an 
unbearable nuisance to all humanity. Neither Bel- 
gium nor France nor Britain is fighting now for 



100 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

glory or advantage. I do not believe Russia is do- 
ing so; we are all, I believe, fighting in a fury of 
resentment because at last after years of waste and 
worry to prevent it, we have been obliged to do so. 
Our grievance is the grievance of every decent life- 
loving German, of every German mother and sweet- 
heart who watched her man go off under his incom- 
petent leaders to hardship and mutilations and 
death. And our propaganda against the Prussian 
idea has to be no vile argument to the pocket, but 
an appeal to the common sense and common feeling 
of humanity. We have to clear the heads of the 
Germans, and keep the heads of our own people 
clear about this war. Particularly is there need to 
dissuade our people against the dream of profit- 
filching, the " War against German Trade." We 
have to reiterate over and over again that we fight, 
resolved that at the end no nationality shall oppress 
any nationality or language again in Europe for 
ever, and by way of illustration, we want not those 
ingenious arrangements of figures that touch the 
Angell imagination, but photographs of the Kaiser 
in his glory at a review, and photographs of the long, 
unintelligent side-long face of the Crown Prince, 
his son, photographs of that great original Krupp 
taking his pleasures at Capri and, to set beside these, 
photographs pitilessly showing men killed and hor- 
ribly torn upon the battlefield, and men crippled and 
women and men murdered, and homes burnt and, to 



THE WAR OF THE MIND loi 

the verge of indecency, all the peculiar filthiness of 
war. And the case that has thus to be stated has 
to be brought before the minds of the Germans, of 
Americans, of French people, and English people, 
of Swedes and Russians and Italians as our common 
evil, which, though it be at the expense of several 
Governments, we have to end. 

Now, how is this literature to be spread! How 
are we to reach the common people of the Western 
European countries with these explanations, these 
assurances, these suggestions that are necessary for 
the proper ending of this war? I could wish we 
had a Government capable of something more ar- 
ticulate than " Wait and see ! " a Government that 
dared confess a national intention to all the world. 
For what a Government says is audible to all the 
world. King George, too, has the ear of a thou- 
sand million people. If he saw fit to say simply and 
clearly what it is we fight for and what we seek, 
his voice would be heard universally, through Ger- 
many, through all America. No other voice has 
such penetration. He is, he has told us, watching 
the war with interest, but that is not enough; we 
could have guessed that, knowing his spirit. As a 
nation, we need expression that shall reach the other 
side. But our Government is, I fear, one of those 
that obey necessity; it is only very reluctantly crea- 
tive; it rests, therefore, with us who, outside all 
formal government, represent the national will and 



102 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

intention, to take this work into our hands. By 
means of a propaganda of books, newspaper articles, 
leaflets, tracts in English, French, German, Dutch, 
Swedish, Norwegian, Italian, Chinese and Japanese 
we have to spread this idea, repeat this idea, and 
impose upon this war the idea that this war must 
end war. We have to create a wide common con- 
ception of a re-mapped and pacified Europe, released 
from the abominable dangers of a private trade in 
armaments, largely disarmed and pledged to mutual 
protection. This conception has sprung up in a 
number of minds, and there have been proposals at 
once most extraordinary and feasible for its reali- 
sation, projects of aeroplanes scattering leaflets 
across Germany, of armies distributing tracts as 
they advance, of prisoners of war much afflicted by 
such literature. These ideas have the absurdity of 
novelty, but otherwise they are by no means absurd. 
They will strike many soldiers as being indecent, 
but the world is in revolt against the standards of 
soldiering. 

Never before has the world seen clearly as it now 
sees clearly, the role of thought in the making of 
war. This new conception carries with it the cor- 
ollary of an entirely new campaign. 

How can we get at the minds of our enemies? 
How can we make explanation more powerful than 
armies and fleets? Failing an articulate voice at 
the head of our country, we must needs look for the 



THE WAR OF THE MIND 103 

resonating appeal we need in other quarters. We 
look to the Church that takes for its purposes the 
name of the Prince of Peace. In England, except 
for the smallest, meekest protest against war, any 
sort of war, on the part of a handful of Quakers, 
Christianity is silent. Its universally present or- 
ganisation speaks no coherent counsels. Its workers 
for the most part are buried in the loyal manufac- 
ture of flannel garments and an inordinate quantity 
of bed-socks for the wounded. It is an extraor- 
dinary thing to go now and look at one's parish 
church and note the pulpit, the orderly arrangements 
for the hearers, the proclamations on the doors, 
to sit awhile on the stone wall about the graves 
and survey the comfortable vicarage, and to reflect 
that this is just the local representation of a uni- 
versally present organisation for the communica- 
tion of ideas; that all over Europe there are such 
pulpits, such possibilities of gathering and saying, 
and that it gathers nothing and has nothing to say. 
Pacific, patriotic sentiment it utters perhaps, but 
nothing that anyone can act upon, nothing to draw 
together, will, and make an end. It is strange to sit 
alive in the sunshine and realise that, and to think 
of how tragically that same realisation came to an- 
other mind in Europe. 

Several things have happened during the past few 
weeks with the intensest symbolical quality ; the mur- 
der of Jaures, for example; but surely nothing has 



104 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

occurred so wonderful and touching as the death 
of the Pope, that faithful, honest, simple old man. 
The war and the perplexity of the war darkened his 
last hours. " Once the Church could have stopped 
this thing," he said, with a sense of threads missed 
and controls that have slipped away — it may be 
with a sense of vivifying help discouraged and re- 
fused. The Tribuna tells a story that, if not true, 
is marvellously invented, of the Austrian represen- 
tative coming to ask him for a blessing on the 
Austrian arms. He feigned not to hear, or perhaps 
he did not hear. The Austrian asked again, and 
again there was silence. Then, at the third request, 
when he could be silent no longer, he broke out: 
" No ! Bless peace! " As the temperature of his 
weary body rose, his last clear moments were spent 
in attempts to word telegrams that should have some 
arresting hold upon the gigantic crash that was com- 
ing, and in his last delirium he lamented war and 
the impotence of the Church. . . . 

Intellect without faith is the devil, but faith with- 
out intellect is a negligent angel with rusty weapons. 
This European catastrophe is the tragedy of the 
weak though righteous Christian will. We begin 
to see that to be right and indolent, or right and 
scornfully silent, or right and abstinent from the 
conflict is to be wrong. Righteousness has need to 
be as clear and efficient and to do things as sedu- 
lously in the right way as any evil doer. There is 



THE WAR OF THE MIND 105 

no meaning in the Christianity of a Christian who 
is not now a propagandist for peace — who is not 
now also a pohtician. There is no faith in the 
Liberalism that merely carps at the manner of our 
entanglement in a struggle that must alter all the 
world for ever. We need not only to call for peace, 
but to seek and show and organise the way of 
peace. . . . 

One thinks of Governments and the Church and 
the Press, and then, turning about for some other 
source of mental control, we recall the organisations, 
the really quite opulent organisations, that are pro- 
fessedly devoted to the promotion of peace. There 
is no voice from The Hague. The so-called peace 
movement in our world has consumed money 
enough and service enough to be something better 
than a weak little grumble at the existence of war. 
What is this movement and its organisations doing 
now? Ninety-nine people in Europe out of every 
hundred are complaining of war now. It needs no 
specially endowed committees to do that. They 
preach to a converted world. The question is how 
to end it and prevent its recurrence. But have these 
specially peace-seeking people ever sought for the 
secret springs of war, or looked into the powers 
that war for war, or troubled to learn how to grasp 
war and subdue it? All Germany is knit by the 
fighting spirit, and armed beyond the rest of the 
world. Until the mind of Germany is changed. 



io6 THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR 

there can be no safe peace on earth. But that, it 
seems, does not trouble the professional peace ad- 
vocate if only he may cry Peace, and live somewhere 
in comfort, and with the comfortable sense of a su- 
perior dissent from the general emotion. 

How are we to gather together the wills and 
understanding of men for the tremendous neces- 
sities and opportunities of this time? Thought, 
speech, persuasion, an incessant appeal for clear 
intentions, clear statements for the dispelling of 
suspicion and the abandonment of secrecy and trick- 
ery ; there is work for every man who writes or talks 
and has the slightest influence upon another crea- 
ture. This monstrous conflict in Europe, the 
slaughtering, the famine, the confusion, the panic 
and hatred and lying pride, it is all of it real only in 
the darkness of the mind. At the coming of under- 
standing it will vanish as dreams vanish at awaken- 
ing. But never will it vanish until understanding 
has come. It goes on only because we, who are 
voices, who suggest, who might elucidate and in- 
spire, are ourselves such little scattered creatures 
that though we strain to the breaking point, we still 
have no strength to turn on the light that would 
save us. There have been moments in the last 
three weeks when life has been a waking nightmare, 
one of those frozen nightmares when, with salva- 
tion within one's reach, one cannot move, and the 
voice dies in one's throat. 



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